Guilty Pleasures: Josie and the Pussycats
I have over 1,200 DVDs, 3,000 CDs and a couple hundred books; over half of them the average person would be completely embarrassed to own. I, however, defend my purchases.
Episode 9: Josie and the Pussycats
Oh snap! This Article just got real! This has been the first movie someone has specifically REQUESTED that I write. I accepted because, well, I had to defend this movie sooner or later. If you ask me, there are two people that exist in this world, those who love Josie and the Pussycats and those who haven’t seen it and thus assume they’d hate it. The people in that second group don’t know what they’re missing. Josie and the Pussycats is an incredible social satire about the music industry, perfectly capturing the climate of the early 2000’s. Also it’s funny as hell.
Josie and the Pussycats is about the titular band consisting of best friends Josie (Rachel Leigh Cook), Melody (Tara Reid), and Valerie (Rosario Dawson). After years of going unnoticed they get signed by Mega-Records. Within a few short weeks they are the world’s biggest group playing sold out shows, going on TRL, and attending exclusive parties. However MegaRecords has some evil plans of brainwashing and splitting up the group up their sleeves.
Josie and the Pussycats is a film that works on various layers. It’s both an outrageous comedy as well as a satire on the music industry. Let’s go back to the year 2001. Every afternoon after school kids from my junior high would flock home in order to watch Mtv’s TRL and see what video made it to number one. It was almost always Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, or Britney Spears; regardless of the lack of suspense we couldn’t wait to hear what won that day. It’s in that boy band and bubblegum pop saturated time a movie like Josie and the Pussycats could exist.
The film opens with Du Jour, a boy band featuring the likes of Seth Green, Donald Faison, and Breckin Meyer (aka LOVEBURGER!). Since this is Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont’s follow up to Can’t Hardly Wait these cameos are hardly shocking. The entire scene is shot for shot what the average teen would be seeing every afternoon when they tuned into MTV.
As the boys get back on their private plane, it’s pimped out with various logos. It’s to be noted that despite all the product placement the makers of the film never received a penny for the advertisements. They thought it’d be hypocritical of them for a movie that mocks product placement (remember that scene in Wayne’s World… imagine if that was the whole movie.)
The boys ask their manager Wyatt (Alan Cumming) about some ‘weird sound’ they heard in the back of their new single. Wyatt goes to the front of the plane, puts on a parachute and says to the pilot “it’s time for operation Take the Chevy to the Levy”, an obvious reference to American Pie (a song about the death of three of the rock legends who died in a plane crash).
Almost every line of dialogue is a carefully placed reference to the music industry and advertisement culture. There’s so many comments on how Kaplan and Elfont see the music industry that it’s safe to say, they weren’t a fan of the bubblegum pop of the 2000’s either. One of my favorite jokes is Josie and the Pussycats being signed without anyone at Mega Records even hearing their songs. That’s not a huge problem though.
The biggest highlight of the movie though is the incredibly infectious soundtrack. The songs are performed by Letters to Cleo vocalist Kay Hanley and work as a nice follow up to Cleo’s last album Go! What’s ironic is despite the movie’s poor box-office the soundtrack sold over 500,000 units making it a certified gold album.
Unlike all the other movies that I’ve covered, I really can’t say a single negative thing about this movie. The reason it’s not popular is sincerely because people didn’t give it a chance. People assumed it was going to be stupid based on it being based on a stupid comic and cartoon series. However the writers keep that in mind and take every opportunity to poke fun at the comic’s more useless and unnecessary characters. Much like James Gunn’s take on Scooby Doo, it’s the constant self-awareness that keeps the film fresh and funny for multiple views.
Funny sidenote: I’ve noticed in talking about this movie to other people. Almost everyone who LOVES this movie has the exact same story of how they saw it for the first time. I worked at a video store and it was one of the only movies they could play in the store. They put it on as something to play in the background and instead became extremely drawn into the film. That’s truly the mark of a quality film, it’s video store clerk approved.
