Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

Josie and the Pussycats arrived in 2001 to a shrug and a domestic gross that failed to cover its budget, and it has spent the intervening decades being quietly rehabilitated by people who noticed what it was actually doing. The film's true subject is not the band. It is the machinery that manufactures the band: a record label, MegaRecords, in open collusion with the United States government to pipe subliminal commands into teenagers through pop songs, all so that young people will spend their babysitting money on branded merchandise. The product placement is relentless and unpaid, a running gag the filmmakers inserted on purpose. Here is a studio comedy that treats the music industry as a brainwashing apparatus and the consumer economy as its delivery system. It is a sharper piece of anti-corporate satire than most films that wear the label openly.

The band itself is deliberately multiracial for its moment, with Rosario Dawson standing beside two white co-stars and Donald Faison in the doomed boy band upstairs. Nobody comments on it. The film simply casts and moves on, which is its own quiet statement. Valerie's mounting resentment that the label promotes the white frontwoman over the group gestures toward a racial dynamic without ever naming it, and the screenplay leaves that thread dangling. The all-girl premise, co-written and co-directed by Deborah Kaplan, offers empowerment as bubbly pop fun instead of argument.

Elsewhere the ledger is thinner. There is no queer presence of any kind, no interest in body image, and no environmental concern to speak of. Melody's distracted spaciness exists to be laughed at, not diagnosed. The film does carry a message about media manipulation, but it smuggles that message inside absurdist comedy, which keeps the sermonizing at a low simmer. A movie this silly should not be this prescient. It is, and its failure at the box office remains the joke that outlived the film.