Josie and the Pussycats

Ask the assholes who made Josie and the Pussycats why they made it and I bet you'll feel like you stuck your head up against the ass of a Texas Longhorn because the bullshit's gonna flow hot and gooey. They'll say something about it being fun, or great role models for girls, or other crap that just isn't true. The real reason it was made is because co-directors Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan are soulless, blindly ambitious cocksucking bastards with their dicks in the peanut butter.

Hollywood ran out of new ideas about four years ago, and now they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for old material to retread. Is there anyone who has more than a vaguely fond memory of the original cartoon and comic book? Just because something is old doesn't mean it's a classic. In fact, the original Josie and her little friends were an annoying, half-baked attempt to exploit the popularity of Scooby Doo. They never even achieved the quality of Scoob's dreadful Scrappy Doo years.

But in Hollywood, where executives are empty shells waiting for MTV-programmed teenagers to tell them what to do, Josie is a commodity. The right hipsters told the imagination-free grassfuckers in charge that stupid girls with guitars were hot, and Josie and the Pussycats was dug out of the trash heap. Only after Hollywood decided to make this movie did Elfont and Kaplan bother coming up with a story. And they did the bare minimum, the cinematic equivalent of responding to a homework assignment to write a five page book report by delivering one that is exactly five pages long thanks to a large font and the liberal use of "very" and "really." Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps this movie is the culmination of Elfont's and Kaplan's lifelong dreams, but I hope not. I would like to think they aren't retarded, lonely shut-ins.

You guys know me and know I love people and want to think the best of them. So I believe Elfont and Kaplan are just two more L.A. ass-sucks more concerned with their fucking careers than the millions of people they dump this shit on. Right now, Elfont and Kaplan are sitting in their cushy homes, far more worried about how it does at the box office than whether anyone liked it. Fuck them.

Josie and the Pussycats are three dim girls who dream of being rock stars, not really for the music so much as the wealth and trappings. A sleazy record label signs them to a major deal, they become stars, then discover that their music is being loaded with subliminal messages to trick teenagers into buying crap. What will they do? How will they stop this? Will they be able to stop it while still wearing their designer clothes, and holding all those products so the brand name prominently displayed?

I'm sure a lot will be made about how crass the product placement is in this flaming bag of shit. It is ridiculous, but you see, that's the way people in Hollywood are. They're fucking hypocrites who will complain about others doing exactly what they do. They will urge the rest of us to Free Tibet or Free Leonard Peltier or stop commercialism or cure AIDS, al the while thinking that all they need to do is mention it and they're activists.

At first, I thought the obnoxious product placement was a joke, making fun of product placement by pushing it to the limits. But then, the product placement becomes so tiresomely omnipresent that it isn't funny. If it is a joke, Elfont and Kaplan are only guilty of being so fucking lame they couldn't drop a joke when it wasn't funny anymore. They're sort of like the fat, lonely kid in school who makes you laugh once and then spends the rest of the year desperately reminding you of that in hopes that you'll come to his birthday party and stop making fun of him behind his back. More likely, though, the product placement is not a joke, and it's as funny as laughing at a kid acting retarded, only to find out the kid really is retarded.

But the product placement isn't the most unbearable part of the movie. The part that pissed me off is that these boring, moronic broads are supposed to be some sort of heros. Really, this is a porno with stupidity instead of fucking. Both porn and this movie objectify women, but at least porn dialog is better, and the action is more believable.

The Pussycats are women who talk a lot of shit about loving rock and believing in their music, but they sell out to the first guy (who hasn't heard their music) who promises them stardom. These are girls who love Carson Daly and refer to themselves as "punk rockers" when any self-respecting punk would let that be said with action, not by having to tell people. They are not even as interesting as the dopey self-proclaimed punk rock teens who smoke cigarettes in Hoskinson Park, because at least those girls talk about their venereal diseases.

I mean, the Pussycats are women so clueless and idiotic that their actions do more to reinforce stereotypes of dingy women than my boss Dipshit Suzanne does when she buys more Precious Moments shit at Hallmark. These girls are insults to women, hated by the people who created them, but conveniently stupid enough to fit right into this oh-so-easy lowest-common-denominator crapfest. Hell, my retard cousin Larry showed more smarts than these boneheads when he pooped his pants at the Country Buffet last week.

Add to this that Rachel Leigh Cook and Tara Reid are ugly dogs. Cook is just a short, broad-faced toad, and Reid is so dumb she can't even play a dumb character. Rosario Dawson is sort of hot-looking, though, and she definitely has the best tits of the bunch. Not that this movie would show tits. You see, Hollywood thinks that it's a positive portrayal of a woman, no matter how insulting, so long as they don't show skin. I say, give me a fucking genius who loves to show her tits.

Josie and the Pussycats doesn't think its audience will be smart enough to figure out anything. Every plot point is spelled out, slowly, clearly and several times. Alan Cummings and Parker Posey are so loud, screechy and over-the-top as villains that they become unlikable not as characters but as actors. Do they have no sense of self-respect? Can't they tell they're being asked to act like jackasses? (Cook, Reid and Dawson probably can't because I get the impression they are as dumb as the movie suggests.) Had Cummings and Parker been given something clever to do or some dialog that wasn't a fat ham-sandwich of "bad guy" clichés, it might have been bearable. In Josie, however, they're not as subtle or expressive as the Wicked Witch in the Denver Puppet Theater's production of Hansel and Gretel.

Finally, the movie is chock-a-block with montages. These are the cheapest, most-overused and laziest devices in the movies. It's Elfont and Kaplan screaming "Look how much fun this is! Maybe you can't feel it, but look, this is really fun!" And the montages keep saying it until you suspect Elfont and Kaplan are trying to convince themselves, not us.

One finger for Josie and the Pussycats. When will Hollywood learn that volume and antics don't make up for a lack of imagination? A pile of shit is still a pile of shit, no matter how quickly it's paced.

Oh, regarding my script "a Hell of a Lot Better than Tomcats." I am on page 70. It's gonna take an extra week to finish. It's already better than Tomcats but it's not done. I got sick and that slowed me down. Plus, the baseball season started.