Newsies, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Quality and Just Feel the Love.

Cult Film (n): "A film that has acquired a highly devoted but relatively small group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside of this small group; however there have been many exceptions...Cult films often become the source of a thriving, obsessive, and elaborate subculture of fandom, hence the analogy to cults." - Wikipedia

I think everyone who watches movies has a guilty pleasure; unfortunately I'm in the rotten habit of telling my guilty pleasures to everyone who will listen, and you, my readers, are no different.
I'm not going to lie to you, I'm a fanfic writer. I have been ever since the sixth grade or so, and as a result (or possibly as a cause) I have always been a complete sucker for cult films and TV shows, and Newsies is by far my favourite. I know that there are many other more well-known cult films out there and some fans of other movies who will fight me to the teeth about my choice, but to me, Newsies epitomizes the definition of a cult film, because I was there, and I know how it went.

It's a film that few people have heard of, an innocuous little 1992 Disney musical about the newsboys' strike of 1899 in New York, starring Christian Bale (of future Batman fame, hooray), David Moscow, Bill Pullman, Robert Duvall, and Anne-Margret. It was a box-office bomb, savaged by critics and quickly forgotten....but yet, it wasn't.

Unlike some other cult obsessions of mine, I can actually tell you why I love Newsies so much: I starred (as the character of David) in a stage version of it one summer when I was about 13, and I fell passionately and completely in love with it. When the VHS from Amazon.ca arrived, I watched it every single night, and I'm honestly not kidding you about this. I got the soundtrack and treated it like it was a Fabergé Egg. My obsessive adoration for Newsies lasted from the ages of 13 to about 15 or so, but even after I stopped my daily viewings, it stayed with me. As an example (and my then-boyfriend tried this with me when we were 16, much to his amusement), I could cover my eyes during any part of the film and tell you exactly what the characters onscreen were wearing. Two years after that--a full four years after my obsession wound down--I can still do this trick.

Of course, this was all before I started studying film from an objective point of view. Looking on Newsies with my new critical eye, I cringed at a lot of it--some of the acting is melodramatic to the point of hilarity, the dramatic tension is pretty much at the level of high-school drama class, and Anne-Margret's role is obviously just to get her name on the marquee; her character flits in, sings in a terrible Swedish accent, and flits back out.
Newsies does not have any fantastic camera shots, exquisite pacing, or even a snappy script. It's not the worst movie ever made, no, but it ain't exactly Scorcese.

BUT.......
My god, is it fun.
This is a film that has so much heart in it that some people can't help but be charmed. The actors, even those who may have a slight idea that this isn't exactly Oscar material, just seem to have so much fun--singing, dancing, throwing completely harmless riots, it's all done with this massive sense of hilarity and enthusiasm. The music is by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (both of The Little Mermaid fame); it's cute like anything, and always makes me want to jump up and dance and sing along. Or maybe that's because I already know every single word, I dunno.
The film has gained a massive cult following of people--based mostly on the VHS and DVD sales, and spread by the internet--who are just as devoted as I was. These fans have created their own hierarchies and rankings, their own factions and devotions; Want proof?
As of this writing, FanFiction.net has 5,833 individual fan fics in the Newsies category. Newsies fans are divided into two types, those who love Jack (Christian Bale) and those who love a secondary character called Spot. Homosexual pairings abound, as they always do in fan fiction. Out there on the web is a detailed lesson on how to do the chair dance from the 'King of New York' musical number. People have set up multiple online shrines in memory of one of the actors, who died of cancer--and whose most memorable moment in Newsies is hanging from a spinning ceiling fan as a big finale to a dance number. Little things like that.

A cult film is whatever strikes you deeply for very little reason whatsoever. I can say that my favourite movie is Fight Club, or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and tell you in definitive words why; with Newsies, as good as my vocabulary is, at some point it all just breaks down into a little shrug and an "I don't know, I just do." It captivated me, as it has captivated many others; not because it's particularly brilliant, but because it is goofy, sloppy, silly fun. Despite my craving for intelligent filmmaking, some movies like Newsies are always welcome to space in my collection purely because they never fail to make me stupidly, fantastically happy--and that's something that is incredibly important.