I have gleefully continued failing to be its target audience ever since.
I'd love to say that the nagging resentment I hold for them has to do with the particularly nauseating variety of faux-feminism they used to peddle; I'd settle for saying it had to do with the music. The truth, though, is that they knew, through their charity work, the particularly terrifying mother of one of my particularly terrifying exes, and she could never bloody well shut up about the fact. This is why to this day, while I can summon up a vague fondness for the likes of Take That, Steps and even S Club Seven, any mention of the Spice Girls sets my teeth on edge like a professionally-trained jawbone balancer.
Still, I'm a proper feminist, so when my husband told me the film was surprisingly palatable I shrugged and added it to the list.
The plot is very much a rehash of A Hard Day's Night, in that it presents a fictionalized few days in the lives of the girls and their entourage. It's all supposed to be leading up to a big concert at the Royal Albert Hall, but it detours a lot along the way and frequently flies into flat-out fantasy. Richard E. Grant shows up in the same way that he does in a lot of the films I've written about this month, as do a few much-missed British actors such as Bob Hoskins and Richard Briers There's a vague subplot about a pregnant friend (played by Naoko Mori, latterly of Torchwood), but we never really get that much of an idea of who she is or why she matters to the group.
Essentially, it's a bunch of scenes of the girls romping, interspersed with songs.
The good
It's a funny thing: I'm always happy to write about films I love despite their lack of any discernible merit. What about the other sort, though - the ones which are pretty okay but that I just can't quite bring myself to like?I had a lot of fun star-spotting, certainly, with both the big names and the smaller ones. Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Jennifer Saunders, Elvis Costello and Meat Loaf all make appearances, but did you know that the doctors and nurses in the hospital scenes were played by actors from 90's medical soaps? It's a cute touch, and I'm smiling just to think about it.
I also enjoyed the fact that Geri, the only Spice whose designation didn't describe a personality trait, was given the role of the intellectual of the group, although if I was feeling particularly unkind I could point out that this is a little bit like being the the lively one in a group of sloths.
The musical numbers are well-staged and energetic, and to be honest, so are the comedy interludes. It's just a little like being stuck in a Haribo hailstorm, I guess, and I've never really been that keen on sweets.
The bad
There's nothing I can say here that shouldn't really be prefixed with the word arguably. Arguably there's something a little bit embarrassing about a bunch of grown women referring to themselves as girls, arguably the script is a bit obvious, and if you listen to it with the volume a shade too low, arguably it sounds a bit too much like a Simglish translation of Yellow Submarine.This wasn't a film that was made to be analysed, though, it was made for the fans to squeal over, and I don't think there's much here to disappoint the true believers.
The verdict
I spent the first half of Spice World carping at my husband, being nitpicky over every single perceived flaw. Somewhere close to the end, though, I had a rather surprising epiphany: namely, that I was having a lot more fun with this than I did when I watched the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer. Not much fun, admittedly, but still a whole lot more.Spice World isn't for me, but it might be for you; if it is, I certainly won't judge you for that.
*Like Meat Loaf. And Michael Bolton.
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