Ten Statements About....JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (2001)

It is three hot girls (well, two hot girls and Tara Reid) washing
a car.  Your argument is no longer valid.

"And when the going gets tough--"
"The tough make lemonade!"

1) You want to know just how unintentionally wonderful I find this film? It's the only movie where I enjoy the presence of my ex Tara Reid (It's a long story I don't wish to talk about...but let's just say everyone knows you never give a dog chocolate...). The role of Melody is perfectly suited for her vapid, empty headed persona, and her presence here enhances the film.

(Still doesn't mean I didn't cheer on Carson Daly when he tried to bludgeon Reid to death with a baseball bat....)

2) I think one of the key things that makes the script by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan work is how it embraces the pitfalls of its remit and forces them to work for them. By making the entire film a satire of product placement and the nature of pop music circa 2001, it makes the product placement carpet bombing of the film an integral part of the film's joke.

What's shinier--the CD case, or Alan Cummings' complexion?

3) Every great film needs a great villain--and while an argument could be made for Parker Posey's Fiona as said villain, my favorite is Alan Cummings' Wyatt Frame. Everything about this character, from his usage of famous song lyrics as the names of his nefarious plans to his oily appearance to his strange malapropism, embodies everything I love about Cummings as a performer. Both he and Posey are so perfectly placed in this insane microcosm of a world the film builds that I'm always disappointed when we get to their climatic reveals in the third act.

4) For a movie that should be cynical, even mean, in its conception and narrative--we are talking about a film which has product placement and talk of merchandising its heroines built in--it's surprisingly sweet and gentle thanks primarily to the central three performances. I don't know if Reid, Rosario Dawson and Rachel Leigh Cook knew each other before being in the movie or spent a lot of time together during pre-production, but their friendship feels very real throughout, and its their chemistry and affection that keeps the film from descending into cold, mercenary calculation.

5) I give respect to Elfont and Kaplan for not only breaking the fourth wall, but driving a big wrecking ball right through it...but they wisely establish this early and pick and choose those moments well so that the gags--like when Missi Pyle answers her brother's question about what she's doing here by claiming she was in the comic book, or when the film calls attention to the unlikeliness of the band's meteoric rise in one week--don't jar at all.

6) If there is a weakness in the central trio, it may be the presence of Rachel Leigh Cook as Josie. It's not that she isn't good--she is--but that she tends to be overshadowed by her two co-stars. Cook in particular seems to pale a little whenever she's on-screen with Rosario Dawson's Valerie, who just has a level of charisma she just doesn't have. I admit that the red dye job is also pretty distracting, as its so obviously a dye job, and it seems to emphasize her, ummm, generous chin.

7) This film would have collapsed in a second if the music was lackluster--and thankfully, this probably has one of the greatest collection of power pop songs written for a fictitious band since The Monkees. Written by a raft of power pop luminaries including my beloved Fountain of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, the luscious former frontwoman of Letters To Cleo Kay Hanley (who provided the vocals for Cook) and others, they're perfect lil' nuggets of tuneage and seem exactly like the kind of songs three girls from a small town would write if they're trying to write pop songs.

This is the only film where product placement actually works...

8) You know, for a film that's supposed to be a frothy, silly little comedy, it manages to create a coherent world--and sticks to it. Elfont and Kaplan create this wonderfully subversive history about this conspiracy to control the minds of teenagers and never violates that history for the sake of a gag. Hell, they manage to make the exposition moment explaining all this into one of the funniest sequences of the film thanks to Fiona's presentation of the Eugene Levy hosted presentation film.

9) Now this is the type of film where montages are expected, and there are loads of them. But the genius of these montages is how Elfont and Kaplan work to make each one a little different and distinct--not just through the music, but though the settings, the cutting, and even the storytelling. I was particularly taken with 'Pretend To Be Nice,' which illustrates our heroine's rise to popularity by having them literally climb a giant Billboard chart.

10) I have only mentioned Parker Posey in passing, and part of the reason is that her role is a bit problematic. Yes, she's gorgeous as always, and yes, she has one of my favorite moments in the entire film....but there are frequent moments where she's so over the top she ceases becoming a parody and becomes something of an embarassment, and the subplot that involves her lisping like a duck when stressed just comes off as odd. She doesn't kill the film--far from it--but she is responsible for some of the rare sour notes.

Overall...I continue to marvel at how much affection I have for this, a film that should represent everything I hate about modern movie making...but I do, thanks to its inherent sweetness and surprising cleverness in how it takes on its remit. Don't let its rep as a bomb scare you away!

Oh, and here's some proof that the music rocks....

Ten Statements About....ALONE IN THE DARK (2005)

"Bullet-Cam...do you thing!"

"My mommy says that there is nothing to be afraid of in the dark."

"Your mother's wrong, kid. Being afraid of the dark is what keeps most of us alive."

1) Not even five minutes in, and there's a definite sense of this world being populated entirely by wooden puppets in the guise of actors--oh, and Christian Slater and Tara Reid, which might not mean much difference, come to think of it.

2) Boy, is this film score's action music, with its bongos and disco beats, really, really goofy.

She's a gifted archeologist, and he's a paranormal
investigator.  No really....

3) Movie, if one of your major plot points revolves around a box made of gold...you shouldn't kill a tiny bit of genuine atmosphere later on when a character discovers the after effects of that box being opened by shooting the inside, where we can clearly see that it's a wooden crate spray painted gold.

4) As bad as Slater's psuedo-Chandler posturing is as paranormal investigator Edward, his energy levels just high enough to justify his getting a paycheck for this film, he's thoroughly eclipsed in awfulness by Reid's Aline. With her herky-jerky physical acting, flat line reading and perpetually unbuttoned or belly-baring wardrobe, she's pretty much laughable. She's the most inappropriate archeologist/museum curator ever.

5) I'd be more freaked out by the Xenos, the Alien-like creatures that make up the main threat of the film, if they weren't animated to have this hunched-over with hands together stance that makes me think of them as armored squirrels.

6) One of the fundamental flaws in this film is how it's so intent on trying to share with us this deep mythology of the game that it's based on--you know, the whole Native American Who Discovered A Gateway Into Another World thing, the whole Bureau 713 thing, the whole backstory of Edward--that even the big ol' action sequences of soldiers versus the armored squirrels get bogged down in expository sludge.

One's a cop that doesn't play by the rules.  One's an armored
monster squirrel...they're partners....
(I've just written a better premise than this one)

7) I would really love to know how Uwe Boll justified the frequent cutaways to Catherine Lough Hagquist's Krash, whose whole purpose in the plot is to sit in Bureau 713's HQ in a skullie complaining about how they can't get a signal. Was she doing something for Boll to prompt him to give her so much screentime?

8) Look, I get that the nineteen orphans were experimented on by Bureau 713, and that Edward was the twentieth orphan who escaped...but did we ever get a resolution to what happened to the grown up orphans after they answered the summons of the gold-painted-wood box? Was that whole storyline even necessary, given that the film degenerated in the last twenty five minutes into incoherent punchy-punchy run run?

9) Granted, this makes a little sense now that I know of Boll's proclivity for shooting first drafts...but when you have a character hand another a file saying there is info on three people in it, and the second character proceeds to flip through updates on five people....don't you think it's time to fire your continuity person?

10) Do you think Stephen Dorff curls up in a ball late at night and silently cries himself to sleep in mourning for his career? I mean, at least Slater and Reid had brief windows of success in their career, when Dorff was once touted as the next big thing and can't get work in anything other than direct-to-video films, Tarsem Singh work-for-hire projects...and this, apparently.

Overall...All over the place and messy to the point of incoherence, this does get punctuated by moments of brief hilarity thanks to its gallery of awful performances, awful performers, unbelievable characters (do you think Reid's Aline and Denise Richards' Doctor Christmas Jones meet regularly for Inappropriately Attired Scientist Lunches?) and gobstoppingly bad dialogue. If only that last twenty minutes didn't tip the whole thing into loud nonsense, it might be in the 'unintentionally funny' category.