...pursued by crazed, obsessed fans...
...answering journalists' questions with quirky and irreverent wit...
...under the watchful eye of their over-protective manager....
...donning increasingly-outrageous outfits and costumes....
...and their misunderstandings that lead to run-ins with the law...
...but still they find time to have wacky, youthful, running, jumping, standing-still fun...
...finally culminating in their triumphant, broadcast around the world concert!
Yes, I think we all know the name of this movie, right? Right?
Wrong! While this movie follows all the above tropes, it doesn't star John, Paul, George and the other one. Instead, feast your eyes on Ginger, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Posh Spice! (Not pictured: Penzey Spice, Kessel Spice, or Old Spice)
...all starring in the 1997 classic but seldom seen Spice World!
For those of you who, like Captain William "Buck" Rogers, were frozen alive in 1987 and awoken five centuries later to scenes of global devastation and annoying robots, The Spice Girls were a UK mid-1990s girl pop group that ruled the world with their iron thumbs and massive platform shoes, serenading the nations of the earth into submission with infectious and poppy beats like "Wannabe," which gave culture the now-popular phrase zigazig-ha. Before their eventual defeat by the forces of rock 'n' roll led by General Gene Simmons, the Spice Girls sold over seven hundred thousand billion records, which, if placed end to end, would fall over because it's really hard to stack round things.
Nowadays, left behind except for the occasional two minute feature on I ♥ the '90s and the punchline for a Graham Norton joke, the Spice Girls can look back on their history and shrug and sigh and say that at least they got a few infectiously poppy singles out of their early careers. And a pretty fun and funny, if mostly insubstantial, motion picture.
Yeah, I said it...Spice World is a really fun movie. That it's not in the pantheon of decent music-group motion pictures is probably only the still-too-recent backlash against pre-fabricated pop groups, so perhaps by the more enlightened year of 2525 (if mankind is still alive), they'll appreciate Spice World as ninety minutes of short skirts, really high heels, celebrity cameos, pop music, girl power and more than a few giggles. Really, don't take it so seriously—this is a movie in which the Spice Girls (uncannily accurate in the roles of themselves) cruise around London in their double-decker headquarters, "The Spice Bus."
Like another great British mode of transport, the Spice Bus is bigger on the inside than outside, giving each girl her own personal living space. (A nod to the shared living quarters of the Beatles in the movie Help?)
But did the Beatles have Meat Loaf driving their home? They did not.
Mister Loaf is by no means the sole big-name star appearing in Spice World: you've got Richard E. Grant (Withnail and I) as Clifford, the girls' harried and long-suffering manager...
...Alan Cumming (The Anniversary Party and Josie and the Pussycats, two movies anyone should be proud to have on their resumé) as hapless and ineffectual documentary filmmaker Piers Cuthbertson-Smyth, making a special about the Spice Girls...
...Barry Humphries, leaving his Dame Edna Everage drag behind to play Kevin McMaxford, ruthless media baron and thinly disguised parody of Rubert Murdoch...
...who hires super-sneaky photographer Damien (Rocky Horror's Richard O'Brien)...
...to publicly discredit everyone's favorite pop princesses! Oh no!
Meanwhile, movie producer George Wendt ("NORM!" from Cheers), wants to make a Spice World movie (whoa, meta!)
Meanwhile, the Spice Girls (oh, I'd forgotten about them) are rehearsing for their massive world-wide concert broadcast live from the Albert Hall, but they've always got break-time to hang out with their best mate Nicola, who's played by Naoko Mori. Genre fans might know her better as Toshiko "Tosh" Sato in Torchwood. And you know what that means, Doctor Who fanboys? The Spice Girls are in canon! Yes, it's only a matter of time before The Doctor takes Posh and Becks on as his new companions. Nicola's massively pregnant (probably, if I know my Torchwood plots, by a rift-traveling alien), and you get the idea that she could have been the sixth Spice Girl (Torchwood Spice?) if she hadn't gotten that interstellar bun in the oven. In short, it's an excellent moral for the young girls who are the main target audience of the Spice Girls: use condoms or you don't get to be in the world-wide musical sensation band.
Aside from the main players, the film's chuck-a-block full of cameo guest appearances from big names in the UK music, film, and comedy world. Here's Elton John, quite possibly in the only role where his wardrobe is out-glamoured by five girls:
Here's BAFTA and Golden Globe winner Bob Hoskins in a six second (count 'em, six) cameo...
AbFab's Jennifer Saunders swaps fashion gossip with Posh Spice...
Elvis Costello moonlighting as a bartender...
...and Stephen Fry (known for his roles on every single television and radio show produced by the BBC) as a judge in a dream sequence which predicts the Spice Girls's fall from fame: "You've been charged with releasing a single that is by no means as kicking as your previous records. Nor does it have such a dirty phat bass line. You are sentenced to having your next record enter the charts at 179 and having it fall completely out the following week."
There's a genuine hammy glee to each of these celeb cameos and you have the feeling that they took the role not only because teenage daughters/nieces/girlfriends begged them to, but because they're actually having fun, probably no one more than Roger Moore. Yes, The Saint, James Bond, ffolkes himself as 'The Chief," Richard E. Grant's boss, dispenser of zen coping advice and stroking, upon each appearance, an increasingly bizarre small lap animal:
Not to mention Bob Geldof, Jools Holland, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Ross, Richard Briers...whoa! That sounds like a lot of guest stars, a lot of subplots, and a confusing mess of a film. Well, it really isn't. Not unlike a Spice Girls song itself, each scene is no more than a few minutes, and altho' the plot and dropped-in subplots are manufactured, fluffy, and light, well, so is Cool Whip, and I think we all know how delicious that is.
The comedy and parody is fun but so gentle that, a couple extremely mild sex jokes aside, this is the perfect film for a pre-teen girl slumber party, and the tone of complete non-seriousness makes the background flashback of five young girls struggling to get a break in the music business while scrimping and saving at Bryan Brown's tea shop.
Quite a retcon from the real Spice Girls history of a manufactured band gathered by producers to compete with the equally manufactured boy band groups like Take That and the Backstreet Boys. Which, while true, would not be as fun a flashback of them dancing and singing "Wannabe" in the café, making promises to each other that they'll always stay together when they hit it big.
And you want a big action climax? You've got it, mate! How about Posh Spice saving the day by driving the speeding Spice Bus towards their big gig, all the time the clock ticking...
...and doing it in stiletto heels at that!
A clever poke at the tropes of action films: George Wendt narrates the chase as a movie scene, leading up to the dramatic leap the bus must make across the opening Tower Bridge, providing an amazing stunt scene. "That'll be expensive," doubts Richard E. Grant.
"Not necessarily," points out George.
Happy endings? Why, of course. Tosh has her beautiful alien baby girl, thus forever cementing Earth's relations with interstellar space...
...and the Spice Girls rule triumphant in their smash concert that ends war, famine, disease, crime, and those little fiddly bits at the bottom of a bucket of popcorn that look like you can eat them but usually wind up cracking your teeth. Ouch!
An Unseen Film? Well, maybe by the standards of some of the films on this blog, not really. According to Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia where you can write in the margins!" the motion picture Spice World made one hundred billion zillion trillion dollars and was seen by every man, woman, child on Earth. Even Sting. I'm not certain I trust this Wiki entry edited by "gingergeri123." But there you have it.
But: it's a film that deserves to be seen more widely, because it's not the pop-culture fast-buck rip-off film you might suspect it would be. The humor is light, the plot is virtually non-existent, the music is poppy and historically probably insignificant, but you know what? I laughed a lot...and I came out of the money theater when I first saw it with a big smile and a "That was so much better than it had any right to be!" on my lips.
No, it absolutely is not A Hard Day's Night, even tho' it follows the same tropes and lightweight plot. But it succeeds where so many pop band-centered movies don't: it's colorful, bright, fun and silly. Maybe that's the brilliance behind the creation of the Spice Girls and their alter egos after all: their Spice names instantly gave them personality, even if two-dimensional ones, and where movies like From Justin to Kelly and Glitter fail is perhaps a key to the next producer of a movie opus starring Carrie Underwood or Justin Bieber: make sure the stars have personality as well as musical chops. The best movies starring rock or pop or rap musicians...think not only Hard Day's Night but Purple Rain or 8 Mile...succeed not on the musical but on the dramatic or comic performances of the stars. It might not have been asking much to have the Spice Girls play themselves, but really, nobody else could.
And really, when the Spice Girls peer out at the movie-attending or DVD-watching audience and break the fourth wall during the end credits, it reminds us that there was an age when prefabricated girl groups roamed the earth, scaling the Billboard charts and musical-guesting Jonathan Ross, lipsynching their way to the toppermost of the poppermost. After all, ain't that what it's all about...Girl Power!
I forget where it came from (perhaps a vending machine of some sort?) but I had a sticker of Baby Spice -- aka Emma Bunton -- and I put it in my wallet and would tell people, very seriously, she was totally my best friend.
ReplyDeleteI also had friends who went to go see Spice World in theaters dressed as the Spice Girls (and at least one of them as male). And for some reason we wondered why we were outcasts in high school.
All of this is to say, regardless of how history considers them, I still tend to fall on the "pro" side when it comes to the Spice Girls. (Although, I don't think I've seen all of Spice World, but since it's streaming via Netflix, I'll remedy that soon.)
I remember enjoying this from the goofiness standpoint...OK, and at least 3 of them were hot...
ReplyDeleteI loved this movie! I remember sleep-overs at my best friend's house at which we would watch this movie and sing along, whilst jumping up and down on her parents' bed. Good times.
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