KD^3C^3 - 20250119 Other people were too sentimental

I spent a portion of Friday uncovering articles from a 2003 magazine. Because I can do that.

It started when an online friend mentioned a list of 100 best cult films he remembered reading in an issue of Rolling Stone.

I asked if he knew any of the movies on the list, and after some searching he couldn’t find it. He knew it was probably in 2003 or 2004 and mentioned that he remembered a cover with cult movie characters sitting in a movie theater.

This in turn triggered a memory of my own. I never subscribed to Rolling Stone as a magazine (I do have their RSS feed in my feed reader) but I did subscribe to Entertainment Weekly. YEs, I was the kind of nerd who subscribed to a physical magazine in the early 2000s. EW was where I first learned that reviews were written by people and sometimes their tastes differed form your own. I still remember some of the names of critics writing back then, and I started sharpening some of my own critical skills by comparing what I thought of a movie or TV show to what the reviewer thought.

The cover he mentioned reminded me of something I had seen and probably read, and I figured if it was in a magazine, it was probably in Entertainment weekly as that was the magazine I was most likely reading in the relevant time frame. I did some initial searching and found a gallery of Entertainment Weekly Covers. I browsed through the 2003 ones and did manage to discover one that mentioned The Top 50 Cult Movies. It wasn’t 100 and it wasn’t Rolling Stone, but it fit the time frame and seemed like a possible candidate.

Having narrowed down the search to a single issue, I figured the next step was to see if I could find what was inside. I first turned to Archive.org which has hundreds of old magazines scanned into their database. The collections are rarely complete, but it seemed possible. A couple searches and filters lated, I did find a collection of Entertainment Weekly back issues, but it didn’t include issue 711, from May 23 2003, which was disappointing.

I still wanted to see if this was the right magazine, an if I couldn’t find a digital copy, I would have to track down an original. Off to eBay! knowing what I was searching forbade it easy to find an issue currently for sale, and there were actually a few! I was opening up different listings, while I contemplated if I could justify spending 15 to 20 dollars on a silly internet comment. I have absolutely spent more on sillier things, but this was still a bit of a gamble. if it wasn’t the right issue all I would have done was spend some time and money on a magazine from 22 years ago. 

Opening up the different listings was a great decision, however, because one of the listings actually showed the 2-page spread that introduced the cover article! It showed 4 different characters from 4 movies photoshopped together like they were sitting in movie theater! There was Stephen Root as Milton from Office Space, Daryl Hannah as Pris from Blade Runner, Michael McKean as David St. Hubbins from This is Spinal Tap and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre! I could even zoom in enough on the caption to see the characters and actors named! One thing I should note, that is kind of interesting is that the version of Leatherface depicted is not the one from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as portrayed by Gunnar Hansen, but rather the one from the then new remake with Jessica Biel where Leatherface was played by Andrew Bryniarski. Not that I can tell my Leatherfaces apart on sight, mind you,I just read the caption. Fun Fact: Andrew Bryniarski also played Zangief in the 1994 Street Fighter movie.

The 2-page spread seemed to be had a likely confirmation that this was the genuine article! The cover matched the description, the time frame lined up, this seemed like the real deal! I even sent the image of the 2-page spread to my internet friend toes if it was what he remembered, and he confirmed that it was probably it!

I thought about buying the magazine on eBay, but I don’t know if it’s really something I want to own. I thought it was cool to rediscover it, but the physical magazine didn’t seem to be something I need to hold in my hands. I found multiple lists of the actual 50 films in the magazine that people had copied to IMDB or Letterboxd, so it didn’t seem worth the effort, as I wasn’t going to learn anything I didn’t already know. 

Until I remembered libraries exist. And many libraries are connected to online repositories of journals. What was the chance that my local library had access to a database that also included this specific 2003 issue of Entertainment Weekly? Pretty good it turns out! The first database I found only had full text of issues from 2009-2014, so that was a bus. I did have Abstracts and summaries from articles in other issued, but I wanted more. I checked another database and hit paydirt. Full text of articles from 1990-2022. I found the issue I was looking for and began to scroll through the article list. There it was Top 50 Cult Movies. The actual content of the list was a mix of movies I recognize and ones I didn’t, even though I likely read this article when it was first published. I have some quibbles about a few of the selections, (Scarface and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?) but I also have to remember that the past is a different country and 2003 didn’t have the ready access to so many movies that we have in this digital age, so maybe they were rarer and less know back then. 

I have seen 24 of the top 50 cult movies, as defined by Entertainment Weekly. Not a bad result, if you as me. But at the bottom I discovered something that none of the online lists mentioned! Three special add in lists, that as far as I know were not mentioned anywhere else. Those were: 

RZA’s Top 5 Kung Fu Movies
John Water’s Top 5 Tasteful Movies
Roger Corman’s Top 5 Roger Corman Movies

I’m not entirely sure why RZA was listed here. The member of The Wu-Tang Clan is a well known Kung Fu movie fan, and sampled lots of them in his songs. But he isn’t a creator of cult movies in the same way John Waters and Roger Corman are. Waters is a filmmaker for campy tasteless trash (complimentary) and Roger Corman almost singlehandedly kept the low budget exploration film industry alive. Both of them have movies in the larger Top 50 list from this issue, so their selections make sense. 

It makes sense to ask RZA for his top 5 Kung Fu movies, even if it doesn’t quite make sense to put them in this article. Asking John Waters to list his top 5 tasteful movies (I.e. the opposite of his own movies) is the sort of joke I hope he appreciated, and Roger Corman listing Roger Corman Movies is a funny subversion of the joke established by the Waters List.

So anyway, here are the above three lists, which have, as far as I know not been widely seen or talked about before I found them this week. Sadly, I’ve only seen one from each list, not nearly as good as my score on the larger list. 

Bal, Sumeet, Marc Bernardin, Scott Brown, David Browne, Neil Drumming, Casey Farley, Amy Feitelberg, et al. 2003. “The TOP 50 CULT MOVIES.” Entertainment Weekly, no. 711 (May): 26. https://research-ebsco-com.proxy008.nclive.org/linkprocessor/plink?id=7af3ac24-db62-334c-96f3-2ef3d95d7708.

But that's not all I found! There are DVD Reviews! There’s a review of King of the Hill Season 7 and Sex and The City season 4. My favorite part of the King of the Hill review is when the reviewer mentions According to Jim and call it the sitcom “with the scariest knuckles” a phase that is incredibly evocative even if I have no idea what it evokes. 

There’s also a review of Adaptation on DVD, which is probably my second favorite Charlie Kaufman film. It doesn’t say much interesting, but it’s cool to see all of these different 

Which is something magazines do that we lose out on in today's world of mostly getting individual articles passed around on social media. We don't have the permanent connection between desperate items that makes these physical objects a record of their time, as well as a way of sharing information.

Maybe I'll go hunt down some microfiche next.