Who would expect that a big budget movie based on an Archie Comic and Hanna-Barbera cartoon would end up being a movie so willing to bite the hand that feeds and presents a world where the world of pop music is all one giant conspiracy to sell you things? While it’s selling you things, of course.
Yet despite being savaged by critics back and bombing at the box office at the start of this century, this movie feels more relevant today than nearly anything else that played theaters in 2001. It’s skewering of consumerism is, if anything, even more relevant today. And man, the songs are catchy.
Josie McCoy (Rachael Leigh Cook), Melody Valentine (Tara Reid) and Valerie Brown (Rosario Dawson) are the Pussycats, who have been selected to replace DuJour, the latest and hottest band, but also one who have learned that this is all a big scam on the kids. They pay the price when their plane goes down over Riverdale.
Now, Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming) and Fiona (Parker Posey) have promised the one world government that her new band won’t need to be killed via drug overdose and will get the job done — or else Carson Daly will wipe them out on the set of Total Request Live.
There are so many products placed in this movie that it becomes virtual overload, yet none of them were paid for by the actual companies. They were all placed there by the filmmakers and there are around 73 different products in this movie.
Those songs I mentioned — that’s Kay Hanley from Letters to Cleo singing — make this movie even better.
Deborah Kaplan (who is married to Breckin Meyer, who has a cameo in this movie) and Harry Elfont wrote and directed this movie. They’ve worked together on plenty of other films, including A Very Brady Sequel, Can’t Hardly Wait, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Surviving Christmas, Made of Honor and Leap Year. However, this would be the last movie they’d direct.
I adored this movie when it came to cable a few years after it was released. I was never a Josie and the Pussycats comic reader; just remember them in passing in the Archie comics. But it was so much fun and very entertaining. I didn’t realize there were 73 different products, though. Now I’ve got to go back and watch to see if I can spot them all!
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