I only watched one film this week, and it wasn’t even a film
that I had planned to watch. I was sick and thought seeing something incredibly
sad would make me feel better about my current situation and so I thought I’d
see what the forbidden-love emotional-bulldozer Carol had to offer, but it was not to be and so I found myself in
front of 2001’s comedic masterpiece Josie
and the Pussycats. No, really.
I was nine years-old when this film hit the cinemas, and yet
I don’t remember the TV show before it or the renaissance during the movie’s
promotion afterwards. This isn’t to say that it was bad or beneath me, but it just
wasn’t something on my radar nor was it on the radar of anyone else my age.
This is possibly why it had such bad reception over here. That and that it
would probably have absolutely no appeal to a child.
Josie, played by millennial teen queen Rachel Leigh Cook,
and her Pussycats (Daredevil’s Rosario Dawson and the least child-friendly
American Pie alumnus, Tara Reid) are the local band no one wants to hear until
Alan Cumming promises to push them to the heady heights of rock stardom. But
all is not what it seems, as it never is – children will know this as Cumming
played the villain in the first of the Spy
Kids trilogy that hit the cinemas months if not weeks beforehand. This is
the first and only part of the film that treats children as their primary
audience.
The rest is laugh-out-loud satire, probably putting their
parents in a tricky position of not honking at the jokes too loud for fear of
having to explain why it’s funny that Du Jour, the boy band whose tragic
disappearance sparks Josie and the Pussycats’ rise to fame, have possibly died
in a horrific plane crash – just after Cumming’s Wyatt Frame asks the pilots to
take ‘the Chevy to the levee’.
I’m not ashamed to say that I laughed a number of times
during this film, and it’s not because I have a terrible taste in comedy or
that I wanted to like Josie and the Pussycats,
but it’s because it’s genuinely funny and it doesn’t take itself seriously at
all. So many movies these days want to be darker and grittier – even children’s
television is becoming more complex by the episode – that it’s a complete joy
to watch something that you’re not going to see six different think pieces on
during the next week. Also, I fucking love Parker Posey and am happy any time
she is earning that Hollywood money.
Of course the acting is not brilliant, and the script is written
by numbers. But so were Scooby Doo
and Spiceworld and all of the other
nostalgia trips from the late 90s – early 00s, and I’m so glad because now we
can go back and watch these films for what they were: stupid, earnest,
universal comedies that we just don’t have enough of anymore. We shouldn’t have
to rely on Disney to roll out one new kid’s film every year in hope that they
reference Mad Men or something to
that ilk. We need films like Josie and
the Pussycats to teach our kids that having fun and being silly are a
universal pleasure, and that it never truly goes away.
Films of the week: Josie and the Pussycats
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