Josie and the Pussycats Got Half a Star From Ebert. It Saw Your Phone Coming

In April 2001, Universal released a live-action Josie and the Pussycats, with Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson as a small-town band and Alan Cumming and Parker Posey as the record executives who sign them. It made about $14.9 million in the U.S. against a budget reported anywhere from $22 million to $39 million, which is the kind of range you get when nobody wants to admit the higher number. Roger Ebert gave it half a star. That's a rating usually reserved for movies with the word 'Part' in the title.

Here's what people missed, and they missed it the way you miss a train, by standing right next to it. The villains of the movie run a record company called MegaRecords, which, working with the government, hides subliminal messages in pop songs to tell teenagers what to buy and what to wear. The band is a product. The boy band before them, DuJour, is a product, and when DuJour starts asking questions, the label crashes their plane. That's not a children's movie. That's a documentary that got lost on the way to the festival.

And then there's the screen. Nearly every frame of the thing is crammed with logos, so many that you start to wonder whether the movie sold out or is making fun of selling out. The answer is yes. Directors Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan buried the joke so deep that audiences took the joke for the problem, which is like getting angry at a scarecrow for not having a farm.

The music is the other surprise. The Pussycats' songs, sung by Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo, are good, actual guitar-pop you could hear on the radio, and that's on purpose. A movie about manufactured music needed the music to work, the way a movie about a bank robbery needs a believable bank. The DuJour songs, meanwhile, are perfect parodies of 2001 boy-band music, which is to say they're indistinguishable from 2001 boy-band music. Some of us still know the words, and we don't discuss it.

Cumming and Posey play the executives as two people who have read every marketing book and none of the other kind. Posey especially gives the movie its spine, a vain, frantic villain who seems to be only one bad quarter away from a nervous breakdown, which, if you've met anyone in marketing, is called Tuesday.

Time has been kinder than Ebert. Over the past two decades critics have gone back to it, and a cult crowd now calls it ahead of its time, which is what we say about people who were right too early to get paid for it. Look at it now, in a world where teenagers are sold to by people they think are their friends, and where a pop star's fans can be told what to buy in an Instagram post, and the subliminal messages look almost quaint. At least MegaRecords had the decency to hide them.

Is it a great movie? No. It's broad, it's silly, and the Archie Comics roots are mostly a hat it wears in the first ten minutes. But it understood its moment better than the people who reviewed it did. A fool can laugh at a joke he doesn't get. It takes a critic to write a review of one.