I made it!
It's been a long slog and sometimes a hard one, but I've done what I said I would and written about a different film every day throughout October. What better way to celebrate on the 31st, therefore, than with a good old-fashioned campfire myth?
Ghost Rider was one of the films I had in mind when I first created this blog; everybody seemed to dislike it and I could kind of see why, but that hasn't stopped me returning to it again and again over the years, nor from feeling a quick shiver of happiness whenever I notice Channel 5 are showing it on TV of an evening. A quick poll of my comic-book-movie-loving friends suggests that hardly any of them have even seen it, so if you like, you can view this particular entry as my explanation to them of why they've been missing out.
The Ghost Rider character has actually been going for a long time, on and off, first appearing in 1949 in a series of horror-themed Western tales for short-lived and abysmally-named comics house Magazine Enterprises. Back then, he was a spectral figure on the proverbial pale horse, a thousand miles away from the motorcycling, chain-wielding skeleton modern audiences know. Both versions of the character are visually beguiling, and so the movie tries to unite them in a single origin story.
The prologue explains, in live action and animation, how the Ghost Riders were the Mephistopheles' bounty hunters, and how one rider rebelled and ran away with one particular contract, believing it to be to powerful to fall into the Devil's hands. Flash forward 150 years or so, meanwhile, and we're at a carnival in Texas, watching the Amazin' Blazin' Motorcycle Stunt Show. Barton Blaze and his teenage son, Johnny, are talented performers, but Johnny's heart doesn't seem to be quite in it - his focus is firmly on pretty local girl, Roxanne. We find out subsequently that Roxanne's father is planning on sending her away, and the pair of them make plans to elope the following day.
When Johnny returns to the trailer he shares with his father, however, he finds him asleep in his recliner, and the nearby bin contains a crumpled letter informing Barton that his cancer has spread. Grief-stricken, Johnny heads out to the tent where the motorcycles are kept, and there he meets with a sinister figure who makes him an offer he can't refuse.
The good
In the early stages, at least, Ghost Rider is a proper myth - a simple story simply told that you can't help but want to believe in. I was hooked from the second Sam Elliott read the prologue, and the eventual segue into the carnival segment provides a delicious slow burn. Something awful but also sort of awesome is clearly going to happen, but the movie takes its time and lets you savour every second. There's a beautiful spookiness to it, and it suffuses pretty much the entire first half of the movie.
The performances are pretty good, too, in general. Nic Cage lends the title role a real depth and sweetness - his Johnny Blaze is a lunkhead, yes, but also a philosopher, and a showman, and a romantic. It is his love for Roxanne that drives the action, and it's easy to see why she can never entirely resist him even when his behaviour grows increasingly erratic. As Roxanne, meanwhile, Eva Mendez doesn't have that much to do but be alternately spunky and sympathetic, tasks that she pulls off with more or less equal aplomb. Also deserving of credit is Sam Elliott as the Caretaker, whose voice lends the story much of its flavour.
Of course, it's impossible to discuss a film like this without at least mentioning the visual effects. Different people are always going to have different ideas of what looks fake, but for the most part, everything seemed pretty real to me to me. I often have a problem with artificial-looking CGI fire, but nothing here looked obviously animated to the point where I was unable to suspend my disbelief. Probably the best effect, however, was the Australian landscape that stood in for Texas. It lends an aching majesty to what has to be the film's most beautiful scene, where the Rider and his nineteenth-century predecessor race through the desert, slicing it in two with a trail of red-gold flame.
The bad
A common problem with superhero movies is that the villains are more interesting than the heroes - Batman franchise, I'm looking at you here. It's a problem because within the superhero genre at least, an audience that roots for the bad guy is an audience that's going to ultimately go away disappointed. That said, without a charismatic antagonist, a hero might as well be fighting against, I don't know, a snowdrift or something.
As Mephistopheles, Peter Fonda does his best - an initial act of dazzling cruelty sets the tone promisingly enough - but around halfway through, we're thrown a curveball and he becomes more of a sort of gentleman thief. His replacement, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) has some nifty henchmen, but he doesn't have the charisma or the moves to offer any real sense of menace. From the moment he makes his first appearance, the movie slowly starts to sag around the seams. Two hours is a fairly substantial running time for a film like this, and the final payoff just isn't quite spectacular enough to compensate for the gradually diminishing returns.
The verdict
In the end, your enjoyment of Ghost Rider is likely to hinge on two key factors: firstly, your tolerance for Nic Cage in the sort of role he's famous for, and secondly, whether or not you think things (vehicles, people, household objects, scenery) look awesome when they're on fire. I can offer you no further guidance; it's just something you're gonna have to work out for yourselves.
This concludes my participation in the 31 days challenge, but rest assured, the blog will go on. Join me on Monday for a look back at what we've all learned.
As the 31 Days Challenge has drawn on, I'm ashamed to admit I've become increasingly cavalier in my attitude to finding material to cover. I started out with a whole week planned out, and spent ages tracking down just the right films to fulfil my self-imposed restrictions. By this point? If it's on TV before 10pm and draws less than about a seven on the IMDB, it's probably fair game.
That said, when I saw Footloose on the TV schedules yesterday I initially discounted it. I mean, everybody loves Footloose, don't they? Not me, admittedly, because I'd never actually seen it, but it's one of those movies that seems to have woven itself into the fabric of history, not exactly in a cult movie sort of way, but by becoming part of a shared cultural idiom. Everybody remembers it's set in a town where rock and roll is banned, everybody knows that it's about Kevin Bacon's dancing teenager versus John Lithgow's uptight preacher, and everybody recognises the opening sequence with the tapping feet. I, on the other hand, knew of it, knew it would annoy me, and knew, without looking, that it was one of those films like the original Star Wars trilogy that had an inexplicably high IMDB rating because all the people rating it were clearly idiots.
Pickings were slim, though, so I went and looked anyway. 6.4? Damn, nope, couldn't dismiss it on grounds of unwarranted popularity, particularly given that the critic reviews seemed to be equally lukewarm. I gritted my teeth, apologised to my other half and settled in for what I was sure would be another long hard slog.
The good
All my life I've loved films, and all my life I've loved to read about them. What I'm less fond of, however, is surprises, so before I watch a movie I tend to do my research, even if said movie is decades old and showing on a relatively obscure Freeview channel. It's fairly rare, therefore, for a film to confound my expectations.
Footloose, though? Blindsided me almost entirely. I was expecting annoying teenagers, heavy-handed moralising, casual sexism and John Lithgow hamming it up in the same way he would a year later in Santa Claus: The Movie. What I got, on the other hand, was a surprisingly even-handed drama that only occasionally slipped into cheap sensationalism. Granted, the teenagers were sometimes annoying, but isn't that what teenagers are for?
As Ren, Bacon makes for an engaging hero, not so much a rebel as a vaguely baffled advocate for his peers. Oh, and he really does have all the moves. Lithgow, meanwhile, delivers a far more measured performance than I had been expecting, making the Rev. Shaw Moore a surprisingly nuanced and even sympathetic antagonist. The supporting players are generally solid, too, with Chris Penn and a young Sarah Jessica Parker utterly delightful as best friends to the male and female lead respectively. Lori Singer, meanwhile, playing the Reverend's daughter Ariel, provides us with a complex, brave heroine.
Of course, the main thing you want from a film like this is big dance sequences and a happy ending. Beneath its flash, however, Footloose hides some surprisingly sound political credentials - an early scene, for instance, sees Ren challenging a rival not for calling him a pansy, but for the use of the word itself. This isn't a film where the female characters are treated as quota fillers or fashion accessories, either; both Ariel and her mother struggle with their own dreams and regrets, and it is this that lends the story its momentum. My only real complaint in this respect is that it does all look a tiny bit Aryan - no non-white faces here, and nobody who looks less than cover-model pretty.
The bad
There's not that much here to dislike, so I won't dwell. That said, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the film could actually have stood to be just a tiny bit shallower.
The problem is that the central premise - a town in the 1980s where music and dancing are banned - is such a ridiculous straw man, that it really requires backup by a proper pantomime villain. Shaw Moore fails to cut it not only because he's clearly crippled by grief and remorse, but, critically, because he's so quick to listen to reason when it comes from the people he loves. I know I'm quite vocal about films that revel in sadistic comeuppances, but by the end of Footloose I was actively rooting for Moore to find happiness. This is something I'd actually praise in a serious drama, but in a teenage dance flick? Convention demands the filthy killjoy bastard lands up spluttering in well-deserved humiliation, preferably whilst covered in something likely to incur a hefty dry-cleaning bill.
So, just so we're clear, careful with this one; it contains real, three-dimensional characters and traces of genuine sensitivity have been detected. You have been warned.
The verdict...
...Will be delivered once I've finished wiping the egg from my face. Footloose is far from perfect, but it has charm, a good heart and a few absolutely great dance sequences. Leave Dirty Dancing in the corner (it's toxic, trust me on this) and bring this one back with you instead.
I love caper movies. Watching the best ones feels like watching the creation of an elaborate origami flower - you can see each individual fold being put into place and while it's all clearly very clever, it's not easy to work out what everything means. As the flower grows, there's ruses and red herrings to theorise about, and an assemblage of charismatic characters to root for. The real joy, however, comes in the anticipation of that very last moment, where the flower blossoms and everything suddenly resolves itself into delicate perfection.
I love movies with Mark Ruffalo in them. Or do I? Certainly, I can't recall ever watching him play a character that didn't make me swoon like a Mills and Boon heroine. It's his voice, I think, and the way he moves, simultaneously diffident and driven. It melts my resistance like a blowtorch, but damned if it doesn't invariably make me feel slightly soiled after the fact. I may rave, therefore, about Avengers Assemble and Now You See Me, but I rarely get the desire to watch them again.
I digress, though. Whilst checking my facts for yesterday's film, I happened to read about The Brothers Bloom. It's a caper movie that stars Mark Ruffalo as well as Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, both capable and engaging performers with real acting chops. IMDB users rated it 6.9, which is probably at the lower end of average if you look at it in dim lighting with your eyes scrunched up, so I decided it was probably worth a punt.
Bloom tells the story of brothers Stephen (Ruffalo) and Bloom (Brody), who learn to grift as kids while being bounced from foster home to foster home. Bloom, a sensitive soul, is too shy to speak to girls, so Stephen starts devising increasingly elaborate con tricks that allow him to play any role he chooses, including that of the dashing romantic lead. The perfect con, Stephen maintains, is one where all parties receive exactly what they want.
To say much more about the plot would be to risk spoilers. I don't think it's revealing too much, however, to say it revolves around Weisz' wealthy heiress and, inevitably, that one last con.
The good
This is usually the part where I say that the day's film looks gorgeous, and yes, Bloom certainly does. Director Rian Johnson doesn't seem anxious to tie the setting to any particular time period, borrowing visual idiom from film noir and European fairytales as well as modern crime thrillers. It's quirky, yes, but then so's everything else in the film, from the rhyming prologue to the heiress' hobby of collecting hobbies.
Performances? What did you really expect? Johnson's script is in safe hands here. Brody really gets the chance to use his physicality as the lovelorn Bloom, while Weisz' Penelope is as winsome a heroine as you could hope for. Star prize, however, has to go to Rinko Kikuchi as Bang Bang, the boys' assistant, who has maybe a dozen lines in the entire movie but steals entire scenes with a single roll of her eyes. If there is a weak link here (and I'm not saying there was) it would have to be Ruffalo, who doesn't seem entirely at home in a role that fails to capitalise on his trademark intensity.
The bad
Damn, but Johnson wants people to love this film. Most especially, I think, he wants Wes Anderson fans to love it. What the viewer gets, therefore, is a lot of Andersonesque stylings in the costumes and the mannered dialogue, and the rambling plot that never really matters as much as the character quirks.
Except that, well, Bloom is a film about a con, so plot matters. Or is a film about a con that turns out not to be much of a con the biggest con of all? Personally, deprived of that one final fold to bring the flower into focus, I felt as though I'd been conned myself. Sure, the movie is witty and charming, but is it truly intelligent? Probably not. Half an hour after viewing I was left with that same old Ruffalo hangover; the nasty, slimy feeling I get when a film temporarily engages my heart without actually getting anywhere near my brain.
The verdict
The Brothers Bloom is one of the cutest pieces of filmmaking I've seen in a very long time, with engaging characters and a truly intriguing setup. It's a shame, therefore, that after a delightful first hour Johnson goes for sentiment over substance, leading to a conclusion that fails to pack either intellectual or emotional punch.
Today finds me looking at a low-budget, arthouse Britflick - ask me why, and I'll tell you it's because it was one of only a couple of colour films available on iPlayer. I don't have anything against black and white, but I just don't have the knowledge base to be able to provide any sort of coherent frame of reference.
Unfortunately, skimming the IMDB reviews for Kicks, I'm not sure I'll be able to do this one justice, either - it seems to be the sort of film that invites serious, in-depth critique from a bunch of serious, in-depth people, not the sort of people who'd, say, be typing abstractedly at 5.55am with their minds firmly and sulkily on Marvel's latest casting announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, we should not be giving Benedict Cumberbatch acting work because this will only encourage him to act, and then where shall we be? Up to our eyeballs in the twentysomething equivalent of the Directioners, that's where.
...You get my point, I'm sure. Existing reviews of Kicks tend towards the intelligent and knowledgeable, and at this time of morning I don't think I can necessarily offer either. Still, college try, and all that.
Kicks is Lindy Heymann's second feature, and it tells the story of two very different teenage girls with one shared obsession. Nicole (Kerrie Hayes) is from a deprived background; with mostly-absent parents and little in the way of prospects, she seeks solace by dreaming of the players of her local Liverpool football club. Jasmine (Nichola Burley), meanwhile, slightly older and more sophisticated, longs for the glamorous lifestyle of the WAGs - the wives and girlfriends of the millionaire footballers, with their endless cycle of shopping and parties and beauty treatments.
The pair of them bond whilst waiting for player Lee Cassidy to emerge from a training session. Their friendship develops in scenes reminiscent of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, with Jasmine offering Nicole a glimpse into another world and making it seem almost attainable. Nicole, meanwhile, provides a hideout for them in the form of a static caravan abandoned by her older brother, a serving soldier.
Together, they pursue Cassidy, desperate for any chance of contact with their idol. When chance throws him into their laps, however, what will they do?
The good
This is a beautiful piece of filmmaking that shows Liverpool at its moody best - bleak and dreamlike at once. Long, slow shots of the city seem to turn it into the girls' entire universe. It's a claustrophobic world, though, and the persistently dim lighting acts as a visual manifestation of the protagonists' aching yearning for something brighter.
The soundtrack, too, is pure Liverpool, coming from locals Ladytron. Shimmeringly sinister and suffocatingly oppressive, it forms the film's pounding heartbeat, at times fading almost into nothing before slipping insidiously forth to dominate Kicks' numerous nightclub scenes. Importantly, music is mostly used organically here; while it does cover a couple of montages, I don't recall the it being particularly audible at any other point when it wouldn't have been playing anyway.
Performances are mostly good, with particular credit to Kerrie Hayes - her Nicole is a complex character, but never an incomprehensible one. In the slightly less sympathetic role of Jasmine, Nichola Burley offers solid support. As Lee Cassidy, Jamie Doyle is never entirely convincing, but then, his role is little more than an extended cameo - his function is the same of that of any pop culture idol, a mood board onto which the fans can pin their own fantasies and insecurities.
The bad
What we clearly have here, then, is a fantastic character piece. Does it stand up to closer scrutiny, though? Unfortunately, I'm inclined to say not. Maybe I've watched too much multiplex fodder lately, but I found myself frustrated with Kicks' tonal inconsistencies - it just couldn't decide which damned genre box it wanted to tick. As a thriller, the pacing is simply too slow, while it lets itself down as a drama with a slightly histrionic last act.
The problem is that there's at least three or four interesting stories here, but the film can't decide which it wants to tell and so has a stab at all of them at once. Is it a coming of age drama? Is it a cautionary tale about our obsession with celebrity culture? Is it Kes, or Hard Candy? I'm not suggesting that every film has to fit neatly into its own genre box, but the storytelling here is deeply muddled and not in a deliberate, bait-and-switch sort of way. I genuinely couldn't work out what Heymann was trying to say, leaving me with a final feeling of nagging dissatisfaction.
The verdict
I'm honestly not sure about this one. I started watching hoping for either an interesting drama or a gripping thriller, and ended up feeling as though I'd received neither. My overriding instinct is that this will be one to come back to once Kerrie Hayes has made it big; on the strength of her performance here, I'm sure she will.
Since I started doing this, I've grown to enjoy looking at the Sunday film listings; sure, it's nice to cover movies I know about, but I still enjoy being surprised sometimes. Besides, there's always such a lot to choose from - yesterday, for instance, I could have held off until late and chosen from any number of bad horror films. Dragonball: Evolutions was on, too, but my eyes saw the listing and promptly deleted it from my brain until it was too late and I was already busy doing something else.
Instead, then, today's offering is Tooth Fairy, which is basically a non-seasonal re-write of The Santa Clause. It tells the story of minor-league hockey player Derek Thompson (Dwayne Johnson), whose dreams of being one of the all-time greats were crushed by injury several years previously. Depressed and disillusioned, he basically becomes a professional enforcer, tackling the opposing team's star players and taking them out of the game - a habit which earns him the nickname of the Tooth Fairy.
As might be expected, it's a name that eventually comes back to haunt him when, after getting caught stealing his girlfriend's daughter's tooth money from under her pillow to buy into a poker game, he explains to the girl that there's no such thing. His girlfriend is decidedly unimpressed, but worse is to come, when the following morning he finds a note beneath his own pillow, and it contains not money, but a summons. For the crime of disseminating disbelief, Derek has been sentenced to spend a week as a tooth fairy, wings, sparkle dust and all.
The good
When I selected this movie from the listings, I did so because I knew no matter how bad everything else about it might be, Johnson is one of the most charismatic men on the face of the planet. My reasoning was that he could redeem more or less anything.
Was I right about this? Check the next section down, if you get my drift.
In fact, it was the veterans who carried this one for me. Julie Andrews only seems to get more beautiful as she ages, and Billy Crystal isn't doing badly for himself either. Her senior Fairyland executive and his slightly demented gadget man provided some of the very few high spots in a movie that was otherwise dim in every sense of the word.
I'm not sure what else I can add to the positive column here; there's no particularly glaring sexism or racism, I guess. There's no sizeism at all, either, but that's because with the exception of the slightly saggy Crystal, all the players are perfectly slim and cover-model pretty.
And that's it, really; normally I can find something to enchant me in just about any movie, but sadly this one left me completely cold.
The bad
I doubt that I'll be writing much here that you wouldn't already suspect, to be honest. Tooth Fairy suffers from a so-so script, slightly shoddy effects and the sort of soundtrack that might as well be an operatic aria in terms of the way it relentlessly tells you what's going to happen ten seconds or so before it actually does. All it really needs is a man with an electric cattle prod at your side whispering menacingly whenever he thinks you need to laugh or cry.
What did surprise me, however, was quite what an unlikeable hero Dwayne Johnson proved to be. Now, call me a fangirl if you must, but I don't think the blame for this one lies entirely or even partly on his shoulders. It's just that the character of Derek Thompson was written to be such an unrelenting jerk - okay, we get it, he got burned when he was young and now he's a cynic. This is understood the first time he tells a seven-year-old boy to give up on his dreams. It's not a bad little scene, relatively speaking; it's sort of amusing and sort of sad at once. By the time he's delivered a near-identical speech to more or less every other major character, however, and watched them crumble, it gets hard to shake the feeling that he's just a spiteful asshole who gets off on making people cry. When the inevitable happy ending came around, therefore, I mostly found myself hoping that his girlfriend knew what she was letting herself in for.
The verdict
Is this the worst film I've seen so far this month? Not even close. It's cheap, though, and it's lazy, and ill-thought-out, and vaguely depressing. Your kids deserve better than this, and so do you.
Don't mind me, okay? I'm just sat here wondering whether or not I have the energy to open this entry with a quickie rewrite of the theme from the Brady Bunch TV series. It's tempting, granted, but any time sit down to try something like this I land up looking up and suddenly an hour's gone past and I've written about twenty words, at least five of which I'm not entirely sure about.
Seriously, though, it's just strange the way I know all the lyrics to the Brady Bunch theme, particularly since I don't remember having seen an episode in my life. Was it ever even on British TV? Apparently so, but it was last shown in 1982, when I would've been five years old. One of life's great mysteries, I suppose, albeit not a particularly interesting one.
As far as I can tell, it wasn't a particularly interesting series, either, belonging to that era when US audiences wanted nothing more from their sitcoms than bright colours and simple repetition of catchphrases and life lessons. Of course, I could be talking out of my backside here, in which case, please forgive me? I'm sure I could locate some on YouTube if I was feeling particularly diligent, but I'm just that little bit too frightened as to what I might find.
Anyhow, for the uninitiated, The Brady Bunch was a sitcom that ran from 1969 - 1974. It told the story of widowed Mike Brady and his three sons, and his marriage to Carol Ann Martin, who had three daughters. Interestingly, Carol Ann's former marital status was never disclosed, since the networks were reluctant to have an openly divorced character on mainstream television. The show presented a warm, loving family, with episodes dealing with typical childhood and teenage dilemmas, generally from the point of view of the kids themselves. The original run was followed by a plethora of spin-offs and sequels, but by 1990, no further new material was being produced.
1995's Brady Bunch Movie takes the slightly unusual step of taking the very, very 1970s Brady family and shifting them, unchanged, to 1990s LA. It gives them a fairly generic story of an evil property developer trying to displace them from their beloved family home, and then spends its brisk 90-minute running time riffing on all of the above. The fish-out-of-water elements and the gentle parody meant that this one was something I'd always meant to watch, but somehow it managed to slip beneath my radar for the better part of twenty years. All in all, that 5.9 IMDB rating was the perfect excuse.
The good
I cannot lie, it took me a little while to warm to this one. The Brady Bunch Movie is a send-up, yes, but its preferred method of lampooning seems to involve faithfully copying the old series. The central family themselves, therefore, are as saccharine and sanctimonious as one might (or might not) wish. The performances, too, are highly exaggerated, with every single word and facial expression pushed just a fraction of an inch too far. It's no bad thing and definitely a stylistic decision, but it's not necessarily a style I find easy to appreciate on a personal level.
Before long, however, I was won over by the sheer warmth and good nature of the endeavour. Yes, the Brady family are awful, but they're also awfully endearing - they make it hard not to feel at least a flicker of nostalgia for the good old days, even if we don't remember said days and even if they probably never even existed at all.
Gary Cole and Shelley Long shine as Mike and Carol, the former taking mansplaining to new heights while the latter looks on in wide-eyed adoration and awaits her cue to agree with his every word. The kids are similarly appealing - particular credit goes to Jennifer Elise Cox as Jan, whose every glare and hair-flick are absolutely spot-on.
For a movie about pop culture, the Brady Bunch Movie has dated surprisingly well. It resists the temptation to try too hard to shock either the audience or its central characters, too. Sure, it plays with the family's naiveté in the face of a cynical modern world, but it definitely does so with mischief rather than malice.
The bad
I was hard-pressed to come up with anything I particularly disliked about this one - it was cringeworthy, yes, particularly in the early stages when I was getting into the right headspace, but that's not something I'm prepared to criticise given that cringeworthy is clearly what the filmmakers were aiming for.
Roger Ebert claimed that the modern world it presented was too innocent, and that something more bleak was required; perhaps he was right, but I do think a darker setting would have risked darkening the tone of the movie as a whole and losing the sunny warmth that the team were trying to recapture. I'm not a great fan of cruel humour in general - black humour, yes, but that's something different entirely - and I really liked the fact that this was a film where nobody really got humiliated.
Other complaints seem to be that the film felt a little long, and I think this is harder to dispute. Obviously, there's a certain minimum length that you can expect multiplex audiences to pay for; The Brady Bunch Movie perches right on the edge of it, but it would have been nice to have a little more story to fill it.
The verdict
Here's the story
Of a girl named Sarah
Who wrote stuff about a bunch of different flicks
She thought some were really underrated
Though others made her sick
Here's the story
Of a film named Brady
That the critics greeted largely with dismay
It was about a family from the 70s
In '95 LA
And then one day, Sarah saw the movie
And then took a little time to think it through
And then offered both her readers her final verdict
And told them that on balance "It'll do".
I was born maybe half a decade too late for the Spice Girls to have been of any real interest to me - Wikipedia claims their debut single was released in 1996, although I could've sworn it was a year or two earlier than that. Either way, by that point I was old and cynical, and only liked proper music.* In other words, not really the target audience for Spice World.
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.
