Josie and the pussycats
Year of release : 2001
Run time : 1h39m
Genre : Comedy / Musical
Cast : Rosario Dawson, Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Wood, Parker Posey, Alan Cumming
The movie is based on the 1963 comic book series of the same name written by Dan DeCarlo, and the Hanna-Barbera cartoon based on the comics.
The movie opens with the famous boy band DuJour, meeting their fans on the airport, while giving them a live show. On the plane, after they fight a bit with each other, they turn on their label executive and promoter, Wyatt Frame, about a backing track they discovered on one of their singles.
The executive decides their time has come, and parachutes himself and the pilot out of the plane, leaving them to crash.
Wyatt parachutes in Riverdale, and immediately starts looking for a new band.
The Pussycats play rock music at bowling alleys and on the street, where no one listens or pays attention to them, dreaming of becoming famous.
The 3 girls are best friends, they are such good friends, they took the Riverdale mini bus pass picture together!
Josie is in love with one of her friends, who also sings and plays guitar (just like her), and fixes his truck, hoping he might ask her out.
Wyatt enters a mall and asks the clerk to play the DuJour song they recorder right before their disappearance. The song makes people want to buy many things, and think orange is the new It color. A rocker girl is not impressed, so Wyatt’s team kidnaps her, and looks for a rock band to make famous, as he is pressed by time and Fiona, his boss.
While running from the cops a shop owner called for they were playing in front of his shop, they are almost ran over by Wyatt, who, the moment he sees them, he thinks he found his band. He didn’t even listen to their songs, and as far as he knows, they might not even be in a band, but he wants them to sign with his record label.
Although they think it’s strange they got a deal before the label listening to their songs, they sign the contact.
Although they didn’t record anything yet, their faces are everywhere, and they noticed their band name was changed from The Pussycats to “Josie and the pussycats”, as Wyatt says the public needs someone to identify with.
Fiona, the head of the record company, explains to the people interested in doing business with them (people from the government and labels), they put hidden messages on the songs, and people who listen to them get the urge to buy the things mentioned, and dress, use and consume the mentioned products. If the artists find out about what they’re doing behind their back, and don’t agree, they k1ll them making it look like su1cide or an accident.
The Pussycats finally get to record their songs, and they are put in a studio with a machine which as they record, puts hidden messages on the track. Listening to the song, one of them gets the urge to eat meat, although she’s a vegetarian, while the others want new shoes. So the brainwashing works on them too.
Although it’s only been a week, they are already at number one in the charts, and on cover of magazines, and they even sold out a stadium!
Soon, it’s pretty obvious the record label want to break the girls up, as for their gig, they don’t give an invite to Valerie, and Josie’s face is on everything, as if she’s a solo artist.
I personally enjoyed the movie, although I didn’t expect it. Although they just want to sing, just like the boy band, DuJour, the girls find themselves thrown into a conspiracy in which powerful people want to make money off them, inserting mind control messages in their songs, to control the youth to make money off them, as people like Fiona think the youth are the ones keeping the economy moving, wasting most money on products.
Speaking of which, the movie has a lot of product placement in every scene just like the backing tracks telling people what to like.
Nobody is safe from the mind control, as even Josie falls prey to it, once she listens to a song which makes her turn mean (her friend calls her Bitchy McBitch for it, which made me laugh) and hate her best friends, thinking she’s better off without them.
I liked their make-up, but didn’t like the outfits.
The acting was good.
Carson Daly of MTV and Eugene Levy, who are playing themselves, Babyface, Seth Green, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer and Aries Spears make cameo appearances.
The soundtrack was fine. The songs the girls sang were not bad! Josie’s voice was given by Kay Hanley, the vocalist of the Letters to Cleo, band. Rachael Leigh Cook apparently also wore a red wig for the movie.
The songs sang by the boy band made me laugh, as I found them so bad!
The visual effects were good.
The movie received mixed to positive reviews (53% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and a 47 score on Metacritic). Cinema Score audiences graded the movie a B!
In spite of all this, at the time, the movie was a flop, grossing only 14.9 million dollars at the box office, against a budget close to 39 million dollars.
Allegedly Aaliyah, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of the band TLC, and Beyonce, auditioned to play Valerie, while Maggie Gyllenhaal and Zooey Dechanel auditioned to play Josie!
If you are interested in watching it, you can find the full movie on Dailymotion.
Rating : Worth a watch !