Reading the reviews posted here, I have to wonder what people walking into a movie called Josie and the Pussycats expected. I expected nothing, actually, as live action adaptations of cartoons had proved themselves to be the lowest of all film subgenres.
But the writers of Josie and the Pussycats took the unenviable task of adapting a second rate and all but forgotten Archie spin off and created a smart and witty satire on post millenial pop culture that reminds one less of the Scooby Doo movie and more of Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Basically reducing the entire pop marketing machine to a hideous sublminal brainwashing operation, the movie is filled with hilariously over the top product placements in a joke that seems to have gone flying over the heads of self righteous adolescents everywhere. The satire isn't always subtle (the subliminal message tacked on to the Pussycats' single, voiced by mr moviefone, includes the phrase 'there is no such place as area 51') but it is almost always pretty funny. But the film does a credible job of creating a shiny, brightly colored, and vaguely menacing pop culture fantasy world, where everyone is beautiful and every surface is selling something.
As expected, the trio is played by adorable pseudo teen hotties (Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid), of which only Rosario Dawson rises above the passable in terms of acting. There is a fairly gratuitous cameo by Carson Daly, then Reid's fiancee, that could have been cut out, although on second thought it is kind of funny to see Daly (playing himself, no less) as a smiling, blank faced contract killer. The real stars here are the ever dependable Parker Posey and Alan Cumming, as the ruthless and grotesque record company executives, who provide most of the film's funniest scenes.
But the writers of Josie and the Pussycats took the unenviable task of adapting a second rate and all but forgotten Archie spin off and created a smart and witty satire on post millenial pop culture that reminds one less of the Scooby Doo movie and more of Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Basically reducing the entire pop marketing machine to a hideous sublminal brainwashing operation, the movie is filled with hilariously over the top product placements in a joke that seems to have gone flying over the heads of self righteous adolescents everywhere. The satire isn't always subtle (the subliminal message tacked on to the Pussycats' single, voiced by mr moviefone, includes the phrase 'there is no such place as area 51') but it is almost always pretty funny. But the film does a credible job of creating a shiny, brightly colored, and vaguely menacing pop culture fantasy world, where everyone is beautiful and every surface is selling something.
As expected, the trio is played by adorable pseudo teen hotties (Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid), of which only Rosario Dawson rises above the passable in terms of acting. There is a fairly gratuitous cameo by Carson Daly, then Reid's fiancee, that could have been cut out, although on second thought it is kind of funny to see Daly (playing himself, no less) as a smiling, blank faced contract killer. The real stars here are the ever dependable Parker Posey and Alan Cumming, as the ruthless and grotesque record company executives, who provide most of the film's funniest scenes.