What’s the First Movie You Knew Was Bad?

Everybody learns sometime

I remember this still from the movie running next to a review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III in the local paper when I was a kid. It was the first movie review I ever read.

In the closing months of second grade, conversations on the playground and school bus turned to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.¹ Everyone wanted to see this movie. We had been lured by the previews on TV. We had memorized the first two movies. Our birthday and Christmas lists were full of requests for Michelangelos, Mondo Geckos and Technodromes.

“The paper says it’s not very good,” my dad said one morning at breakfast. “They’re out of ideas for a third movie.”

I dismissed this as yet another sign that grown-ups didn’t get it. At school a few days later, my theater-going classmates’ reviews were in. They loved it. They quoted it and acted it out at recess.

My family didn’t go to the movies much back then², so I didn’t see Turtles III (as everyone called it) when it was brand new. Sometime after the commercials were off the air and the playground quotes quieted down, my mom rented the movie from the grocery store. I popped it into our VCR as soon as she got home.

It wasn’t very good. I didn’t laugh at the jokes. I wasn’t excited by the action.

When the credits started, I rewound the tape and went into my room to find the shoebox of Ninja Turtles action figures where I’d saved the newspaper clipping of the review. My dad or mom had cut it out for me, and I’d put off reading it until I saw the movie. In rural Union County, Kentucky, our daily paper of record was the Louisville Courier-Journal. I’m not sure if the review was from that paper’s critic, whether it was a syndicated movie column, or whether it came from another paper my dad picked up at the office, but I wish I knew who was responsible for that piece of writing, because it changed me. Sitting on the floor of my bedroom, I had a conversation in my head with the critic. I agreed on some points, disagreed on others, and didn’t understand some. When I finished the review, I went back to the top and read it again.

I learned an important lesson that afternoon: Movies can be bad.

I suppose I knew this already, but I hadn’t applied it to anything I liked. We’re credulous as kids. Sure there are things we don’t like, but these usually exist in the category of “stuff for grown-ups.” The plodding ballad on the radio is for adults. The boring news program is what our parents watch. Lima beans are what grown-ups eat. The things we like are the things that are made for kids. And why wouldn’t we like something that’s made for us? In the naivety of youth, a work tells us it’s good simply by existing. Why would anyone release a movie that wasn’t good? Why would they spend money to make it and advertise it if it wasn’t worth our time? These aren’t questions we think to ask when we first start watching.

Learning that art can be bad is an essential step in understanding the world. This discovery brings us to conclusions that are essential to navigating life. The best efforts of even the most experienced, knowledgeable, and successful people can fall short. Professionals can cut corners. Advertisements can intentionally mislead us. Adults can be wrong. They can make mistakes. They can lie.

With the Turtles III review in my head, I became fixated on learning how to tell whether something was good or bad—what knowledge did the writer in the rolled-up newspaper have, and where could I get it? This led me to Siskel and Ebert.³ I had never paid attention to their show before; it was two grown-ups in sport coats talking about movies that usually weren't made for kids. After my critical awakening, I tuned in whenever I could. Roger and Gene's debates taught me that there was no singular good or bad—everyone's ideas are different. We can change our minds and disagree. People can be wrong, and we’re all people. More than their opinions, I liked how Siskel and Ebert explained themselves—they made the case without sounding like kids refusing to take a bite of lima beans.⁴ “Because” is the start of phrase, not the end of an argument.⁵

Realizing movies could be bad taught me about human fallibility. Reading reviews showed me the importance of perspective and logic. But the best lesson I got from my new obsession with assessment was one I had taken for granted before: This is fun. Not every film, book, or record will be entertaining or good, but the experience of watching, reading, listening, and then thinking and discussing is one of the best uses of our limited time on the planet.

Our experiences with art aren’t always pleasurable, but they are worth having. We learn about ourselves and each other and the world. We explore the range of emotions and ideas available to us. We push our capacity for understanding and we indulge in our most closely-held pleasures. It’s the most human thing we can do.

What was your moment of critical consciousness? What piece of art or culture that made you realize that movies, music, or books could be bad? Tell me in a comment or a Note.

1. Sometimes the movie has the subtitle “Turtles in Time.”

2. We lived in a very rural area and I don’t know where the closest theater was. I do remember seeing Milo & Otis in the theater while my brothers saw the first TMNT movie. I grew up as a devotee of the VHS rental.

3. The Siskel and Ebert page is a great resource of their old episodes. They didn’t review Turtles III, but they did review Turtles II…and hated it. The word “depressing” comes up a few times, and that’s without any discussion of the prolonged Vanilla Ice cameo.

4. Lima beans are the main food I remember not liking as a kid. They’re good, though. We all learn.

5. Thirty years later, I wonder how universal my experience is. I think about it when I see a fanboy filming his excitement for some detail in the latest superhero movie or when online armies so vehemently insist on the perfection of the target of their fandom that they make it a trending topic on Twitter. This isn’t engaging with art. It’s performing devotion and denying reality. It rejects the idea that anything made for you could be bad.