Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

Such a frustrating disappointment

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

THIS IS A CULT CLASSIC UNDISCOVERED GEM. Amazing songs, hilarious 2001 style, and a goofy Zoolander-type industry spoof with DIVERSE WOMEN as the leads????? Um, okay I get why it wasn't a critical hit but come on, this is FUNNY. Missi Pyle, Parker Posey and Alan Cumming are all hysterical and I quote this movie all the time with my friends. Do not watch this thinking it will change your life. But I guarantee you, if you actually give it a chance, it will make you LAUGH. And that's better.

What an awesome movie. I suppose I would have to categorize this under guilty pleasure since it seems to not get much love. The rating on IMDb is wrong on a level I can't wrap my head around. This is one of those movies a lot of people, particularly guys, will look at and dismiss it just by its concept. Well, it's their loss as they're missing out on a very fun and funny movie. I'm a straight guy and I enjoy this movie on the face of it. Not for camp value or any other backhanded compliments. This is a well-produced musical comedy with great songs and some biting satire of the music industry and commercialization. The actors are all good and seem to be having a blast. The three leads are especially fun. One of Tara Reid's better movies, with some early Rosario Dawson and "She's All That" herself, Rachel Leigh Cook, both of whom I always like.I've been a big fan of this movie since it was first released. The music is upbeat and catchy. Way better than the average music written specifically for a fictional band or artist in movies. I played the soundtrack to death back in the day and still listen to it when I need a pick-me-up today. It's not just the Pussycats songs that I like but also the parody songs from the boy band Du Jour. I think in years to come Josie and the Pussycats will become a cult favorite. It's too good to go ignored forever. I really hope history vindicates what I consider to be one of the best comedies that came out in the 2000s.

Someone once asked me why I thought so many rock stars were left-wing, and I cynically replied that, as their target audience consists mostly of the more idealistic members of the younger generation, protesting against greed, acquisitiveness and the materialism of the capitalist system is a great way to make money. Films like this one, a satire directed at the record industry, consumerism and the capitalist system in general, tend to inspire me with a similar cynicism. I am generally suspicious of anti-materialist or anti-capitalist satire emanating from Hollywood, an institution which lives and dies by free-market principles and which is always readier to preach the virtues of thrift, frugality and glad poverty than to practise them. Whenever film-makers rail against Big Business, there is generally a good business reason for them to do so. "Josie and the Pussycats" started life as a strip cartoon published by Archie comics. I can't say that I'm really familiar with it, but I do recall the television cartoon from my childhood in the seventies. It was about an all-female rock band made up of three girls with contrasting hair colours and equally contrasting personalities, Josie (vocalist/guitarist, redhead, sensible and practical), Valerie (tambourine, brunette, headstrong) and  Melody (drums, blonde, sweet- natured but a bit dumb). This film is loosely based upon the comics and the cartoons. The basic idea is that a corrupt record label, MegaRecords, is brainwashing teenagers to buy their records, and many other products as well, by putting subliminal messages under the music. If any of the musicians discover what MegaRecords are up to, they have to be disposed of. In the opening scenes we see Wyatt Frame, a MegaRecords executive, arranging for the members of Du Jour, the label's biggest boy band, to meet their deaths in a plane crash because they have started asking too many awkward questions. This, however, leaves Wyatt with a problem; MegaRecords now need a new group to replace Du Jour. In the small town of Riverdale Wyatt finds a hitherto unsuccessful girl band, the Pussycats, persuades them to accept a lucrative record deal, and propels their first single to the top of the charts. Which leaves just one question. What will happen when the Pussycats discover (and, of course, they invariably will) just what Wyatt and his boss Fiona are up to? Satire, in the cinema or in any other medium, needs something more than just a target to attack. The film never generates a lot of humour, and the characters are all pretty unmemorable. Neither Josie nor Valerie emerges as a well-defined personality. There is some attempt to make Melody a simple-minded airhead like she was in the cartoons, a characterisation owing something to popular prejudices about blondes (and possibly also to pop music's prejudices about drummers). In the cartoon, however, Melody may have been a dumb blonde, but she also had a lovable sweetness about her, something that does not really come over in Tara Reid's interpretation. Reid, in fact, struck me as miscast; she is several years older than her co-stars Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson, and I felt that the film would have worked better with a younger Melody, playing her as a naively innocent teenager as opposed to the more worldly twenty-something Josie and Valerie. Several other characters from the cartoon, such as the Pussycats' laid- back upper-class manager Alexander, his obnoxious sister Alexandra and Josie's boyfriend Alan are imported into the film, but they all play minor supporting roles and it is clear that they are only there because fans of the original would have been disappointed had they been omitted. (And whatever happened to Alexandra's cat Sebastian?) Wyatt is a very one-dimensional character, an effete long-haired fop who speaks in the sort of fruity upper-class British accent that the British upper classes largely abandoned several decades ago. Worse, though, than the film's poor characterisation and the low standard of its humour, is its hypocrisy. Two big Hollywood giants like MGM and Universal are not really in a position to start throwing stones at the record industry or anyone else when it comes to accusations of manipulating public opinion or subliminal advertising, especially in these days when film studios and record labels are often part of the same commercial conglomerates. The blatantly obvious product placement with which the film is littered was probably intended as an ironic in- joke, but to my mind it tended to undermine the film's ostensibly anti- consumerist message. I said earlier in this review that protesting against greed, acquisitiveness and the materialism of the capitalist system is a great way to make money. Except in the case of "Josie and the Pussycats" it wasn't. The film actually made a loss at the box office, possibly because its target audience were more aware than the film-makers hoped of the essential contradiction in its position. Or possibly because it's just not a very good film. The moral of the story is not so much "Don't trust what the capitalists tell you" as "Don't trust what anyone in the entertainment business tells you- even when they're telling you not to trust what someone else in the same business tells you!" 4/10

Rocker chicks get a record deal.It's a free-for-all when fame and fortune tears apart the friendship of three girls in a heavy metal rock band who have secured a contract to become the next international music superstars. Maybe this film would have been better if it was given an R-rating so that Rachel Leigh Cook could show her chest. That's all I was thinking about every time she was standing there without a bra under that flimsy little piece of cloth she was pretending to use as a top. Female teeny-boppers may like this for the music and the glitz, but I like it for the purpose of staring at Rachel's shapely boobs.Rating: Two stars - one for each boob.