Rosario Dawson has had a varied career, starting as a complete amateur in Larry Clark’s Kids to eventually working with such heavyweights as Spike Lee (He Got Game, 25th Hour), Oliver Stone (Alexander) and Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof). But there’s one gem on her resume that the Top Five actress doesn’t understand why people continue to sleep on, and the answer might surprise you.
Dawson was speaking with THR about her top roles, and mentioned that the 2001 comedy Josie and then Pussycats is far better than people give it credit for. She told the trade mag:
That movie is so amazing, and it really didn’t hit its audience then. People didn’t really get it. But if you watch it now, it’s so on the money — from media manipulation to endorsements and boy bands. We shot it in Vancouver, and [co-stars] Tara Reid and Rachael Leigh Cook were the biggest stars on the planet at the moment. Tara was getting married to Carson Daly, and it was such a weird little crazy moment in time."
It was, indeed. Josie and then Pussycats also was coming on the heels of several other movies based on pop-culture TV hits, like Charlie’s Angels and the two Brady Bunch movies. Audiences very likely were starting to burn out on these types of comedies, and they probably didn’t have a lot of love for the Josie and the Pussycats cartoon in the first place. The animated series sprang from the characters in the Archie Comics, and followed an all-girl punk band who often got mixed up in spy stories and mysteries while they toured the world. In animation form, they looked like this:
Co-directors Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan tried to do something more with the premise, making it a semi-scathing satire of the entertainment industry. The co-directors were red hot, coming off of Can’t Hardly Wait, and they coached a few scene-stealing performances out of Parker Posey and Alan Cumming in Josie and the Pussycats.
Is it "so amazing," as Rosario Dawson remembers? I can’t say. It’s been a decade since I watched it in theaters. The trailer gives you a good idea of what it was all about:
But will you revisit it thanks to Dawson’s recommendation?
