Josie and the Pussycats

Recently the world collectively let out a groan as Hanna-Barbera productions unleashed the latest incident in the very long and very sad history of live-action adaptations of classic cartoons with their new feature film "Yogi Bear".  If the mere concept of making Yogi Bear into a live-action film doesn't scare you away, these details will:  Yogi and Boo-Boo are terrible CGI creations and they're played by Dan Aykroyd and Justin "Backstreet's Back Allright" Timberlake respectively.  The saddest part is that "I Want it That Way" is the only one who sounds even remotely like the classic cartoon characters they're supposed to be.  Will this movie be good?  Was "Alvin and the Chipmunks" good?  Was "The Squeakquel" good?  Was "Scooby-Doo"* good?  Was "The Flintstones" good? How about "G.I. Joe" or "Transformers" or "Dragonball:  Evolution" or "The Last Airbender" or "Aeon Flux" or any other movie ever adapted from a cartoon?

Here's the sad truth:  live-action adaptations of cartoons are never good.  Its like a law of nature.  I don't really understand it myself, since several of those movies listed there had plenty of potential - "G.I. Joe" was so close to being decent.  So close!  I think the universe is actually conspiring against these movies for the sheer travesty of taking cartoons out of their natural healthy environment and putting them in the strange smelly land known as "the real world".  Why not just make a cartoon movie?  I'll never know.  But I do know this:  Hanna-Barbera Productions is currently in line for making about four other live-action adaptations in the coming decade, like "The Smurfs".  I don't think I'm alone when I feel ice crawl up my spine when I say "The Smurfs:  The Movie".  Uch...  What else can they drag up from the depths of Boomerang's mid-day line-up to make into a bad live-action movie?

But almost the moment I say "list action adaptations of cartoons are never good" that I realize that this law is hardly universal.  There is indeed one, and only one movie based on a cartoon that actually was pretty decent.  And that movie was 2001's "Josie and the Pussycats".

Ironically enough, the movie I've picked for being superior to all the others is in fact by far the biggest box office bomb, and so the most obscure of the entire category.  Even amongst critical reception it was merely mediocre - RottenTomatoes calculates that only about 53% of the critics at the time liked it, well below the range for a "good" movie.   "Josie and the Pussycats" didn't just fail, it was a disaster:  millions of dollars were lost, the career of its star was massively injured, a massive legal battle ensued over royalty rights (when ultimately there were none since I don't think this movie has ever managed to turn a profit), and time has completely forgotten it.  What we have here is another lost gem like "Head".  If only you were to take the time and dust it off, you might actually have something of value.

In order for you to appreciate this movie, we need to rewind ourselves back to the turn of the millennium right before 9/11.  Back then, just before the true horrors of international terrorism struck home, America was able to look around at itself and foolishly imagine threats within.  For example, back in early 2001, you could actually be reasonably concerned with the stranglehold MTV and bad synthetic pop artists were having on the youth of this nation.  Today of course, we have perspective, but back then the Spice Girls really might have been the Antichrist.  Try not to laugh.  So that's where this movie takes place:  when engineered musical acts were at their most engineered and most soulless.  Thank God that's all over with, right?

...At least I wish that last sentence were true.

Anyway, "Josie and the Pussycats" completely ignored any possible continuity with the classic cartoon or the Archie Comics or any other Pussycats-related work from the last fifty years.  Instead it imagines the Pussycats (sans "Josie and" in the title) as a high school garage band of Josie, Valerie, and Melody, who suddenly are taken in by Alan Cummings, a music executive who makes all of their dreams come true in a matter of hours.  Suddenly the now "Josie and the Pussycats" are the world's most popular band ever, with hit records, and massively successful singles.  Unfortunately all this success  is actually a maniacal scheme using subliminal messages used to take over the minds of teenagers and create a zombie army of consumers who will eventually conquer the world.  (I thought I said "don't laugh".  When this movie came out girls were ritualistically murdering their families to make burnt offerings to N'SYNC - it all made sense then.)  Worse Carson Daly and Mr. Movie Phone are in on it!

Okay, nothing dates a movie worse than a "Carson Daly" reference, but stick with me here.

So maybe the plot is a bit ludicrous (some critics called this movie "as bad as 'Spice World'" rather unfairly I think), but there is one silver lining here.  Josie is played by the soul-crushingly cute Rachel Leigh Cook, an actress so beautiful that she single-handedly turned "She's All That"** into a ridiculous parody of its own plot, Melody is played by that Goddess-like mix of golden-brown goodness that is Rosario Dawson, and then... there's... um... Tara Reid.  Yeah, I know she barely counts as a human yet alone female, but at least at this stage in her alien life-cycle metamorphosis she almost escaped the uncanny valley... if you squinted a bit.  The movie does its best with her by casting her as a moronic bimbo - one gets the sense that Reid may not have actually known she was doing a movie here.  But two out of three is not bad, especially when Rachel Leigh here is looking the best she has her entire life.  She's so perfect looking here that they even make jokes about it - the music industry fashion manufacturing process cannot find a single thing to improve on her.

Along the way the movie never really takes itself all that seriously.  It goes ahead and makes fun of subliminal advertising and then parodies the practice by including a cooperate logo in just about every shot.  There's a massive "star-making" montage which ends with Josie asking "isn't this weird that all this happened in just a week?"  (For 2001, that wasn't weird, Christina Aguilera was a drug-addicted prostitute just one week before she was a household name with a hit record - and now ten years later she's again a drug-addicted prostitute.)  Carson Daly, playing himself, gives away the entire evil scheme with such a matter-of-fact tone that you realize that the movie is parodying its own premise while parodying the evil of cooperate music.  This isn't muckraking, its merely satire.  There are legitimately funny moments here, unlike "family comedies" such as "Alvin and Chipmunks".  I mean, it isn't the funniest movie in the world, but the jokes work often enough.  Though on the other hand, the movie's lack of seriousness means that the plot ends with a series of ludicrous twists that simply destroys most of my respect for the script.  Its best to ignore the ending if you're hoping to like this film.

Of course, very little about any of this actually has anything to do with "Josie and the Pussycats".  There are stretches in this movie, long ones in fact, where the only thing even remotely Hanna-Barbera or Archie Comics about this is the "ears for hats".  Really the only two characters who are in-character are Alexander, the band's kinda manager, and Alexandre, the bitchy girl who tries to be Josie's rival.  They're basically playing the roles as from the cartoon, which means they're completely out of place here.  The movie even has a character ask Alexandra what's she's doing going along with the Pussycats' rise to fame, to which she replies "I was in the comics".  There isn't much of a fourth wall to this movie.

Unfortunately I can't really call this is a "great movie" either.  Most of what makes it enjoyable is exactly what ruins it.  There's so much parody, so much silliness, that there really isn't much of a character dynamic amongst anybody.  I really can't find much of a character trait to Josie, though her main love interest is far worse.  His name is Alan, and is played by a poor-man's James Spader.  This character is that lame "perfect boy" from Magical Girl Anime:  he's good-looking, he's kind, the protagonist is in love with him, and he has all the personality of a block of plywood.  This trope isn't a real male character, he's an one-dimensional ideal of a male, just as unrealistic and meaningless as the Victorian ideal of women.  Its frightening in a way.

Then again, as bad as that might be, the soundtrack is easily the best part of this movie.  None of it is sung or performed by the actresses themselves but its still really good.  Kinda a girl-punk (have you noticed that I'm totally out of my element by trying to critique music yet?).  Yeah, I suck at describing it, here's a sample:  Three Small Words.  Maybe you won't like it, but I do. Simple as that really.  Everything else in this movie is a parody of the late 90s and early 2000s music scene, but at least this part of the film took itself seriously.  As a matter of fact when this movie first came out I only saw it because I liked the song in the trailer.  If you decide this movie isn't for you in the end, I'd recommend getting the soundtrack.  It seems like all the forgotten good movies have great soundtracks.... weird.

Though this movie does end on a rather odd note:  the evil government/corporate conspiracy is found out and abandons its plan to use soulless brain-dead music to control the masses, they instead decide to turn to movies.  And today we have a trailer for a live-action "Yogi Bear" starring a CGI creation so horribly fake looking that for almost a second you don't notice how awful the voice acting is.  A movie cannot be this bad unintentionally.  Think about it.

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* 2002's "Scooby-Doo" is a landmark film only in how unbelievably lousy its cast was.  Here's a film with Freddie Prinz Jr. Matthew Lilliard (who unlike everybody else here was actually good in one movie), Sarah Michelle Gellar, and a computer-generated dog.  But even so, this massively terrible cast was made to look like master Shakespearian-trained thespians when compared to the actress who played Velma, Linda Cardellini, who gave a performance so wooden that copies of this movie are to this day still used as seeds in tree farms in the Northwestern United States.  This movie got a sequel, by the way.

** "She's All That", if you're a little too young was a silly high school movie that basically stole the plot of the musical "My Fair Lady" which in turn stole its plot from George Bernard Shaw's drama "Pygmalion".  All three involve a man popular in society taking a woman who is unpopular or "uncultured" and making her fit into the proper role of a lady.  "She's All That" decided to break all Suspension of Disbelief by trying to claim that Rachel Leigh Cook was somehow unattractive and needed, of all people, Freddie Prinz Jr. to become beautiful.  Who were they trying to kid?  Rachel Leigh is the kind of girl that makes flowers sing melodious love songs.  Freddie Prinz Jr. is the man who makes flowers recite bad Gothic poetry.