Josie and the Pussycats (2001) ✦ Full-Length Watchalong Reaction
Added 2024-10-09 18:00:04 +0000 UTCHello everyone! Here's a different kind of movie compared to the usual. (I was giggling at all your 2001 guesses on the weekly schedule post.) Thanks so much to Tyler for requesting this one on Reactr! My opinion of course, but to me this truly feels like they took the vibes from Spice World and the vibes from Austin Powers and fused it together. 😂 [Direct link here.]
Please enjoy!
Comments
Funny how that works!
Nathan Jasper, the Artist Formerly Known as Primary
2024-10-10 20:22:30 +0000 UTCIronically, as mentioned, the audience it was really appropriate for *was* people over 20, and not young teens, who would not understand the satire; I think the vast majority of the movie's current fanbase is 30-year-olds in the present day.
Tyler Foster
2024-10-10 15:15:19 +0000 UTCreturning after watching - I tend to agree with your outro comments. I remember getting the triple feature set with Blue Crush, Honey, and Josie and the Pussycats. I remember really enjoying it back then, early 2000s, whenever it was I saw it. But now at 34 I feel like I've outgrown it, which is not something I say about a lot of things considering I'm still a big Disney pawn, but it was definitely for a certain audience in a certain time period.
Nathan Jasper, the Artist Formerly Known as Primary
2024-10-10 02:17:48 +0000 UTCSlightly weird thing that has nothing to do with the movie... I was a bit alarmed when I noticed that the Kaiielle channel had disappeared from the Patreon left sidebar under my "memberships" list. I thought maybe you'd left the platform. But you turned up when I manually searched. I wonder if anyone else had this same issue.
WastedPo
2024-10-10 01:27:18 +0000 UTCConnecting the dot with Spice World is actually pretty much on target; even aside from the Alan Cumming connection I think there is a fair amount of overlap between the audiences for both films as these cult oddities presumably aimed at young women but which contain subversive material that give the films a new layer when viewed as adults. That subversive material was kind of what sunk the movie in 2001. When writer/directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont were first offered the movie, they didn't have any idea what to do with it; much of the cartoon has no plot and some of it even takes place in outer space. It was only when they realized this would be an extremely rare opportunity to direct a big-budget Hollywood musical that accepted the job, and came up with the satirical storyline about the secret messages and brainwashing based on the manufactured sound of late-'90s pop music. Unfortunately, when the film was actually finished, the same girls they wanted to watch the movie were the ones who liked pop music, not to mention the intended audience was probably a bit too young to "get" it. Of course, even adults didn't get it: I mentioned it in my note, but it is kind of ridiculous how many professional critics did not get that the movie's wall-to-wall brand logos were a joke (and while they were all legally cleared, none of the brands were paid). I agree that you could watch the movie multiple times and not catch all of them; my favorite one is that one of the houses they cut to during the concert has a framed Purina Cat Chow logo on the wall next to their family pictures. The one silver lining is that the filmmakers were essentially free to make whatever they wanted. They received a list of things from Archie Comics that they had to put in the film, but they were pretty silly: the girls must wear seatbelts, the girls must practice good oral hygiene (so they put in a scene in the opening credits montage of them brushing their teeth), etc. They brought in an all-star lineup of musicians to work on the soundtrack, including mega-producer Keith "Babyface" Edmonds, songwriter Adam Schlesinger (RIP) -- most famous for the Fountains of Wayne song "Stacy's Mom," the title track for the movie That Thing You Do!, and the soundtrack to the great musical sitcom "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend -- and singer Kay Hanley of the band Letters to Cleo as Josie. The three leads also went through a band boot camp to learn how to convincingly play their instruments, and they sing backup on most of the songs. The directors themselves wrote the cheeky double entendre DuJour song "Backdoor Lover" and the more generic "DuJour Around the World," (In an interview at the time, they claimed "Backdoor Lover" had no second meaning, and being naive, I fell for it) as well as the main single "Three Small Words." I especially love the countdown in the chorus: "it took 6 whole hours and 5 long days 4 all your lies to be undone, and those 3 small words were way 2 late, can't you see that I'm the 1?" I guess they were also pretty proud of getting the Meat Loaf song you loved into the movie. During the making of the movie, Tara Reid (you didn't mention where you'd seen her, but probably The Big Lebowski) was married to Carson Daly, which is why they spend most of the assassination attempt joking about how they ought to go out. Breckin Meyer, wearing the flame shirt and do-rag, is actually a close collaborator with Seth Green, having done lots of voices on Green's TV show "Robot Chicken," and he also played the stoner character in Clueless, alongside Donald Faison, who is also in DuJour. Missi Pyle is indeed from Dodgeball, and also Galaxy Quest, where she played the Thermian Laliari, who falls in love with Fred, aka Tech Sergeant Chen, and then is credited in the reboot "Galaxy Quest" as Jane Doe. As mentioned, around the 15th anniversary or so, many of the young women who watched the movie when it was new and liked it for other reasons started rewatching it and finding out that there was more to it than a lot of movies based on old TV shows. The directors have described a particularly funny moment where they went to see a U2 show and got to speak to Bono backstage, and Bono gushed about how the movie got everything right about how the recording industry works. I'll also put some fun links in the Discord, such as an on-stage reunion with both directors, Kay Hanley, Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid, and Rosario Dawson, done for the launch of the album on vinyl a few years back, which was accompanied by a live performance of a bunch of the songs, and a special set by the band Charly Bliss where they played the entire soundtrack from beginning to end. Also, fun fact: one of the movies hypothesized for this upload was Legally Blonde, which you said you've already seen. Both Josie and the Pussycats and Legally Blonde were produced by Marc Platt, and they slipped a Josie reference into Legally Blonde, where Elle Woods says "whoever said 'orange is the new pink' was seriously disturbed." Google is wrong, by the way, about Alan Cumming -- he was only in X2, as Nightcrawler. Don't think he came back for any of the other movies.
Tyler Foster
2024-10-09 21:03:21 +0000 UTCI remember this movie with the classic back door lover song 🤣
Ray H
2024-10-09 19:39:13 +0000 UTCOh wow! I definitely never would have called that! Looking forward to watching this one again.
Nathan Jasper, the Artist Formerly Known as Primary
2024-10-09 18:09:58 +0000 UTC
