Absolutely Fantastic

It is so daring, it is so ambitious, it is so thrilling and weird and pointed and powerful. I never knew where it was going.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I can't believe this movie was made in 2001. It seriously has a sense of humor that feels so modern. You can just picture the memes and gifs that would come from this nowadays.Anyways, the plot is absurd, but pretty funny. The music is catchy. The characters are ridiculous and the villains are amazing. Only thing that holds this back from being a perfect movie is Tara Reid. They needed a smart actor to play someone so dumb, but, you know, it's just Tara Reid being Tara Reid..

What an awesome movie. I suppose I would have to categorize this under guilty pleasure since it seems to not get much love. The rating on IMDb is wrong on a level I can't wrap my head around. This is one of those movies a lot of people, particularly guys, will look at and dismiss it just by its concept. Well, it's their loss as they're missing out on a very fun and funny movie. I'm a straight guy and I enjoy this movie on the face of it. Not for camp value or any other backhanded compliments. This is a well-produced musical comedy with great songs and some biting satire of the music industry and commercialization. The actors are all good and seem to be having a blast. The three leads are especially fun. One of Tara Reid's better movies, with some early Rosario Dawson and "She's All That" herself, Rachel Leigh Cook, both of whom I always like.I've been a big fan of this movie since it was first released. The music is upbeat and catchy. Way better than the average music written specifically for a fictional band or artist in movies. I played the soundtrack to death back in the day and still listen to it when I need a pick-me-up today. It's not just the Pussycats songs that I like but also the parody songs from the boy band Du Jour. I think in years to come Josie and the Pussycats will become a cult favorite. It's too good to go ignored forever. I really hope history vindicates what I consider to be one of the best comedies that came out in the 2000s.

After gaining some street cred I decided to delve into this cartoon inspired idiosyncratic experience with little expectations and much dread given previous attempts at live action versions of childhood favourites Garfield, The Flintstones or Scooby Doo. Nonetheless Josie McCoy (played by the petite Rachael Leigh Cook) and her accompanying kitties - bassist Valerie Brown (Rosario Dawson) and drummer Melody Valentine (Tara Reid) - exceed and entertain to a surprising attempt.Neither playing it straight or going all out goofy, "Josie and the Pussycats" fortuitously creates a wacky world, which plays both into the caper ridden stories of the cartoon, as well as manages to deliver a malleable story accessible for kids of all ages (including those in their mid-life crisis). Fleshed out through a mix of deadpan and silly humour, coupled with some successfully intuitive restraint the cartoon adaptation comes of witty and affable, a far cry from the forced idiocies of their counterparts.Superficially (and somewhat hypocritically) touching on issues of the current era of commercial brainwashing and pop culture, "Josie and the Pussycats" become superstars as part of a dastardly marketing scheme. Within the framework of a story, which is undoubtedly predictable to the fullest, the characters molded with the script are wickedly pleasurable. This especially goes for the ridiculous boy band foursome DuJour, played to hilarious effect by Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, Seth Green and Alexander Martin, whose brief outings are the crème de la crème of the whole movie. Equally satisfying are Alan Cumming as the devious band manager Wyatt Frame and Parker Posey as despicable me record label mogul Fiona. An additional shout-out has to go however to Tara Reid, who gets the stereotype of an idiotic blonde bombshell to a T, delivering one of the funniest performances I can think of.Given the strength at the back Rachel Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson come off a bit stale, given their more set and conventional personaes, as if hijacked by the more wackier character deliveries. All in all, despite the generic storytelling and some plodding delivery, "Josie and the Pussycats" turns out to be an unexpected ounce of cartoonesque satisfaction, albeit not anything that comes off as timeless or memorable.

Josie and the Pussycats is a film that a lot of people understandably avoided upon its release. Not only was it surrounded by the unpleasant controversy of equally unpleasant Archie Comics completely screwing over their most famous artist of over 40 years -- who was reasonably outraged of their unauthorised usage of a character based off his wife -- but it was also very clearly a desperate attempt to cash in on characters that had not featured prominently in any popular media for years.Entertainment does move in cycles, and it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that, in the squeaky-clean teenybop year of 2001, that one of the original squeaky-clean teenybop groups would attempt to stage a comeback. Archie Comics as a company are well-known for attempting to exploit any and every possible trend or fad, and they can't really be blamed for that. However, the real-world events behind the film completely ruin its attempted message.Essentially, the message of the film attempts to convey exploitative corporate (and governmental) evils. It's impossible to take it on its own, however, despite the directors' clear attempt to make the characters and circumstances their own: it's a film attempting to take the moral high ground on the topic of corporate evil, made possible by a company that at the time was committing one of its most grievous corporate evils. Because of that alone, the film is undermined before it even begins.There are some amusing moments and some satire that works in the film. The acting isn't too terrible for the most part, although there are some truly shameful performances in it, and by that I mean career lows. I can't imagine most of the cast would happily recall Josie and the Pussycats as a film they were too proud of making. Between the mediocre-to-bad songs, the self-aware attempts at humour that almost always try too hard, and terrible miscasting in places, it's difficult to feel much affection for the film.Even for fans of the comic (Josie hadn't had a regular series of her own in nearly 20 years when this film was released), the film couldn't help but be a disappointment: the actors barely resemble the characters they're intended to be, such as the skinny Alan M. who is a mousy, terribly untalented folk singer. While his looks don't thrill, he also doesn't have a personality to make up for it. What happened to Alan M. the muscular blond roadie? What about the Cabots, longtime best enemies of Josie and her gang? They didn't even pop in Pepper for a cameo.The worst thing about the film is that it really didn't know what it wanted to be or who it wanted to appeal to as an audience. People who already knew Josie and the Pussycats would be insulted by the 'interpretation' of the characters, which were far off-base and barely included any of the memorable cast from DeCarlo's comics. People unfamiliar with them would either not be interested in a superficially teenybopper film or put off by the heavy-handed attempt at satire which simply falls flat more times than not. Was it a romance, a satire, a parody, a comedy, a chick flick, a friendship movie, a romance...what? It's all over the map, and not in a way that respectably combines themes to form a stronger whole. In this film, Josie and the Pussycats could have been replaced by anyone, and nobody would have noticed the difference.Of course, it also didn't help that by 2001, even the most popular girl group in years, the Spice Girls, had largely faded off the map and gone their separate ways. By 2001, people of all ages were growing tired of the sentiment embraced by the film Pussycats; they wanted a break.While the intentions of the film might have been honourable in questioning corporate endorsements and government roles in popular media and entertainment, the film itself was not realised as well as it could have -- and should have -- been. Surrounded by the controversy of the nastiness of its own corporate master, Josie and the Pussycats is an exercise in irony more than anything else, and on so many levels. For a film that makes such fun of pre-fabricated pop music and artificial groomed 'instant celebrities', it certainly tries to dole out those very things, which is regrettably hypocritical. So it fails even as a commentary, even if taken on its own merits, apart from Archie Comics and their machinations. It's not very funny, it's not that interesting, it's nothing that hasn't been done before, it's not subtle, the music isn't very good, the acting isn't that great, the casting is terrible, and well...it isn't Josie and the Pussycats at all.