Directed by Amy Heckerling
Written by Amy Heckerling
Starring Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy
USA, 1995
Rated PG-13 (sex-related dialogue, drugs)
This 1995 summer flick is, as far as I’m concerned, a ‘90’s classic. Loosely based on Jane Austen’s 1800’s classic, Emma, Clueless updates the still-vital work of the writer without ever being pretentious about it. Austen’s witty observations of human mating rituals lend themselves nicely to the film’s high school milieu. Gloriously brought to life by Alicia Silverstone, clueless matchmaker Emma Woodhouse has become Cher Horowitz, a sophomore at the top rungs of her Beverly Hills high school social ladder. With the help of her posh friend Dionne (Stacey Dash), she tries to hook-up everyone from her teachers (Wallace Shawn and Twink Caplan) to Tai (Brittany Murphy), the ugly duckling newcomer she has taken under her wing. Writer-director Heckerling throws in a bunch of hilarious, quotable one-liners, blending aristocratic talk with adolescent slang. Their use of upper-class vocabulary doesn’t make them sound more intelligent, but these characters are smarter than they let on. “Searching for a boy in high school is like searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie,” Cher sighs. And there’s a certain thrill in watching her innocently putting the egotistical deep-thinker to shame with her knowledge of Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, even if you are a deep-thinker.
Clueless is filmed in sunny colors reminiscent of Noxzema commercials, and the entire cast, especially Silverstone and the never-mentioned Paul Rudd, lend the movie their good performances and alluring faces. It’s like Pillow Talk, only more clever. The social classes of high school are perfectly and humorously illustrated: the violent gangs, the stuck-up philosophers, and the potheads are all represented in the margins, while the spotlight shines on the pretty popular people. High school fashion (the film’s funny costumes are by Mona May) has remained relatively unchanged since the movie was released- boys are still flaunting their boxers with their casual hip-hop attire, and girls are still wearing their outrageously revealing, come-hither skirts. Clueless is a high school satire, but its tone is not condescending or bitter, and that’s why it feels fresh in an age where all the popcorn movies have turned sour and cynical. American teenagers spent $150 billion dollars collectively last year, and the media portrays us as machines being fed money by guilty, inattentive parents. Cher and her friends delight in being habitual consumers, but Heckerling finds the heart beyond the materialism, and the innocence beyond all the teenage sex and drugs.
Cher is a professed virgin and, bizarrely enough, she finds her match in her Nietzsche-reading, Radiohead-listening ex-stepbrother Josh (Rudd) in a sequence self-mockingly put to a cover of “All By Myself,” the Eric Carmen power ballad. The scene of their first kiss is filled with an innocent hesitance that is far sexier than anything in the dirty teen movies of today, or any of the Britney Spears videos. It’s naïveté without stupidity, and sexiness without menace. Of course, both Cher and Josh are young and it’s easy to imagine them falling out of love, but movies like these exist only within the boundaries of their durations; everything after the ending is “happily ever after.” Clueless is supreme fluff, even when its jokes are lame; it satirizes its target audience, who can laugh at themselves without feeling self-hatred. Like teenagers, the characters realize the humor in adolescence, and choose to revel in it.
Today, it has become so easy to lampoon youth, maybe too easy. Teenagers may have tortured souls, but most of us can take a joke; all of us know what adults say about us, and we can laugh because it’s all usually true and funny. Fans of ‘Nsync know that everyone who’s not in their camp is mocking their tastes. Valley girls and jocks know they’re the butt of jokes, and most of them just seem to be parodying themselves. Josie and the Pussycats doesn’t get the joke. Spun off from the Archie Comics girl band, the movie takes it upon itself to teach kids a thing or two about how big corporations are marketing just about everything to them, a fact we all know quite well. Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, who wrote and directed it, have a stiff style and a self-righteous script, a would-be gem with all the spunk and sense of humor sucked out.
The movie opens like an episode of MTV’s boy-band-spoofing series “2Ge+her.” The hot group DuJour perform a forgettable pop tune (laden with anal sex inferences) to a crowd of screaming, crying fans before glamorously disappearing into their private plane, much like the Backstreet Boys did in their cheesy “I Want It That Way.” When they are killed in a crash, Alan Cumming must go looking for a new band to turn into the next big thing. Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid play Josie, Val, and Mel, the wide-eyed Pussycats, your everyday homegrown rock band. They play at bowling alleys, are the laughing stock of the popular girls, and are looking for a record deal. Cumming plucks them out of the murky streets of New York, and swiftly packages them and throws them onto a towering Times Square billboard before they have even recorded a note. Little do they know that the record company is using them to brainwash the children of America with subliminal messages controlling just about everything listeners purchase.
Josie and the Pussycats is not a waste; there is definitely truth in its half-hearted satire, and pop culture is stared at with a judgmental eye. Josie is shoved into the spotlight because she is the lead vocalist and guitarist, and her fellow band members feel betrayed, a jab at attention-stealing divas like Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny’s Child. Freethinking music lovers are kidnapped by the record companies and disappear off the face of the planet. I visited Times Square just about a week ago and the luminous buildings and rampant commercialism gave me the feeling of falling; the film treats it like the source of all the world’s evils and it is reimagined as dark and apocalyptic. MTV, a major participant in the film’s making, is depicted as one of the government’s accomplices in the mission to conquer young people’s minds. Carson Daly- MTV’s most popular VJ, Tara Reid’s real-life fiancée, and today’s Dick Clark- punctures his cool, boy-next-door persona when he attempts to do away with Mel.
The film points the finger at the flood of advertising teenagers are exposed to everyday and, in the film’s most effective joke, it bombards the screen with Target, Revlon, MacDonald’s, Starbucks, Evian, MTV, and Sega product placements. The liberal use of logos gives the film a sense of saturation, and Matthew Libatique brings his unique eye to the teen movie, using fluorescent instead of natural lighting for the scenes set in corporate New York. The occasional rock musical numbers feature some pretty catchy girl-power pop-punk reminiscent of the Go-Go’s and are edited and filmed with a hectic jerkiness that makes the girls look cool. The vocal and instrumental performances establish something important that is often forgotten about teen pop music- no matter how overly stylized and bland the teeny-boppers come across, there is usually some obscured talent behind all the glitter. The film resembles a McG video, where the colors all bleed into one another; it’s pretty unattractive, but it gives the film some of the rebel verve the script, the direction, and the cast lack.
By being a film targeted at teenagers, Josie and the Pussycats hopes to wise-up its audience. Unfortunately, it seems determined to repel the viewers, dehumanizing all its adolescent characters and playing childless blame games. There is some honestly interesting material in the first hour, and then everything gets dull and didactic. The film refuses to realize that even kids have the ability to think for themselves. All the responsibility for pubescent stupidity has been shifted from the children to the marketers and the moguls. The movie is not the wake-up call it intends to be; it panders to both the teenagers who listen to Ani DiFranco and Phish, and those who listen to Limp Bizkit and Britney Spears. It’s the most insulting movie I’ve seen in a while because it doesn’t respect its audience- the “conformists” or the “non-conformists.” The moguls themselves are revealed as wounded souls who were bullied when they were young; Elfont and Kaplan go for every teen cliché in the book. There’s not even a shred of emotion to be found in this mess; the chemistry between the three leading ladies is, sadly, non-existent, despite the obvious efforts, and there’s a dumb romantic subplot that has even less spark than I’m accustomed to expecting from a teen movie. Josie and the Pussycats hopes to be an unconventional flick with a message; what’s disappointing is not that it’s a teen pop movie, but that it ends up being as manufactured as every other teen pop product out there today, and it’s not even catchy.
By Andrew Chan [APRIL 28, 2001]