Which movie was your ELECTRIC HORSEMAN?

Joe Posnanski:

So, I have another movie theory. It's a bit vague, but it generally goes like this: There comes a moment in your life when you see your first "bad" movie. And after that, nothing is exactly the same. It's like finding out about Santa Claus or the Washington Generals or that some GMs in sports really don't know what they're doing.

I put "bad" in quotations because I'm not actually referring to simply bad movies. There are a lot of bad movies -- you can't avoid them for very long. I'm referring to the a movie bad enough to change your whole view about movies. I remember my first "bad" movie. It was Electric Horseman. That's the one where Robert Redford rides a horse in a casino. Man did I loathe that movie.

Before that, I thought movies were magical. I don't mean that I liked every movie I saw -- I didn't. Some were boring. Some weren't funny. Some were way too long. But even those were MOVIES, capital letters, and the overall experience was mesmerizing. How does that bumper sticker go? You know, the one about a bad day fishing? "A bad day fishing is better than Bart Simpson peeing on a NASCAR number and Impeach Obama?" No, that's not quite right. Bumper stickers kind of blend together for me.

The point is that for me, as a kid, a bad day at the movies was better than doing just about anything else. The whole experience -- walking into the theater, smelling the popcorn, finding the perfect seat, hearing the sound of sneakers sticking to the butter- and candy-coated floor, falling way back into that seat (it seemed like every movie chair back then had a broken back). Then there was that captivating moment when the lights would begin to dim, and the curtain would begin to pull back to expose the film screen. Man, did I love those few seconds -- and it depresses me that most movie theaters don't do that now. I used to love just watching the curtains pull back and pull back, and there was no telling how far apart it would get or how big the screen would end up being. The screen, it seemed, was always bigger than expected.

Then there was the movie, and no matter how bad it might be based on conventional standards (like plot, acting, script, scenery, character development), it always had something that made me happy to be there -- a good joke, a pretty actress, a cool special effect, a stirring scene, a great song, something, always something. And when the movie ended -- no matter how good or not good it happened to be -- I would need to sit there for a moment, watch the credits, let it sink in, brace myself for reentry into the atmosphere. When I walked out into the harsh and bright sunlight, I would need to cover my eyes, I would feel this terrible disappointment because it was over even if "it" happened to be a lousy movie.

Yeah, then I saw Electric Horseman.

I guess it comes down to this: Electric Horseman was the first movie I ever saw where I honestly would have preferred to be doing something else. Anything else. It wasn't just boring, it was interminable -- at least for an 11-year-old. I longed to be playing stoop ball in front of our house or reading an Alfred Slote book or watching whatever sport might be on television or, frankly, doing homework or washing my parents car or clearing the driveway of snow. I don't know if Electric Horseman is really that bad, and I never will know because I'll never watch it again. That movie broke the magic. After EH, movies started being just movies. They became "good" and "bad" in adult ways.

pretty much every movie has this effect on me tbh

I've been trying to think of the first film I felt really let down by, and I keep thinking either Interiors or Stardust Memories. I have a feeling it was the latter, which tells you something about how adept I was at that age (17) at convincing myself something was worthwhile if I thought it was important. Somewhere in around there, I started to break free of that.

I'm sure I must have disliked quite a few movies before I was 12 years old, but the first time I actually remember sitting in a theater with my family and feeling vaguely insulted that we were wasting our time on something that was lazy and shitty in a way that I wasn't used to most movies I saw being was Look Who's Talking Too.

probably wholly moses, miserably dudley moore "comedy" from 1980. first movie i ever walked out on, at age 13.

the real eye-opener wasn't a movie, though, it was the bugs bunny cartoons of the 60s and 70s. my brother and i loved them to death, but when i was about 11, i began to notice that some of them were a hell of a lot better than others. specifically, the older ones were better. the thing my brother and i latched onto was the "toe swish". in a number of the 40s & 50s cartoons, the animators make a big-little deal of bugs' foot leaving the frame when he exits in a hurry. the foot hangs there for a second, then zips out of view, accompanied by a zingy noise and trailed by an elaborate motion line. we called this the "toe swish". in a good toe swish (or coyote drop), the rhythm, the combination of movement, sound and time is badass. we loved those little details, labors of love on the animators' part, and they're entirely missing from the cheap, shitty product cartoons the studio cranked out later on.

noticing that killed a lot of the joy of cartoons for me. for a while, anyway...

"my science project"

"Twins"

Joe Posnanski has a much better memory than I do; I could never in a million years remember the first film I merely disliked (as opposed to the more retrievable memory I posted about above).

this was probably "pinocchio and the emperor of the night" for me.