Who thought seeing cats could be fun?
The music industry is Josie and the Pussycats’ ball of yarn
REVIEW
JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS
Starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson
Directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont
Now showing
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Frankly, given the body of work, I would have chosen Betty & Veronica as a feature film before Josie and the Pussycats. B&V has more of a built-in classic protagonist-antagonist set up, perhaps resulting in a sumptuous "eat the rich" finale at Lodge mansion. However, having an all-girl band as the lead characters is pretty irresistible, even though most people in the audience have never read the comics or seen the cartoon version of Josie and the Pussycats. And if they have, it was a very long time ago and the actual characters are a bit of a blur. But what the hell, it’s a night out.
The filmmakers have a ball mocking the ridiculous lengths that corporations will go to have their logo placement in movies. The filmmakers also go to great lengths to tell the kids not to be fashion slaves. But where they totally go to town is tearing up the dying epoch of "the boy band" (I pray it’s dying). The whole opening scene could have easily turned into a fish-barrel-gun carnage scene when the boys from "Du Jour" show up for a quick tarmac song for the fans at the airport. Instead they "play it real." From their manager keeping them together to the fact that they never take off their hands-free microphones, Du Jour is a terrific parody.
When Du Jour appears to catch the number one killer-of-musicians-disease – sudden catastrophic death – The Pussycats are thrown into the limelight. The upside is that a girl band with their own instruments is making the world forget about boy bands. The downside is that the evil music company is still running the world by abusing good and pure pop music.
The goofy fun only runs flat when you realize that, as main characters go, Josie, Valerie and Melody aren’t exactly burning up the screen with character or dialogue. Melody, being the drummer, has a vacuum between her ears, which is amusing, but Josie and Valerie play it straight. What ever happened to the wisecracker? Where’s the Jughead character to liven things up?
Nevertheless, chase scenes, yummy boys-from-next-door, lots of pop music (sung by Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo) and frenetic shooting and editing make Josie and the Pussycats a silly romp, that could only have benefited from a little more silliness. |
