by Bob Spiers, 1998.
Starring: Alan Cumming, Richard E. Grant, Meat Loaf, Roger Moore, Claire Rushbrook, Baby Spice, Ginger Spice, Posh Spice, Scary Spice, Sporty Spice, and George Wendt.
Rating: 10/10, 5.5/10.
This movie is so funny, so, so, so funny. It’s basically a week or so in the life of a version of the Spice Girls that is slightly more fictionalised than the real one. We get to see them talk to aliens, go to dance boot camp, film a TV appearance in Italy with scantily clad men, stay up in bed together in a spooky old house, ride around in a gigantic double-decker bus, go to parties, get bored, get excited, imagine their futures, remember their pasts, and eventually, perform in London.
Along the way we get a big bunch of hilarious characters and jokes, like Alan Cumming’s Piers Cutherton-Smyth, who is trying to make a ground-breaking documentary about the Spice Girls but who really can’t do it at all, and Roger Moore, who plays someone who is probably the record label’s head, acts like a James Bond villain rather than James Bond himself, and says absolutely incomprehensible but deep-sounding things. We even get Meat Loaf, as the driver of the double-decker bus, who, when asked to clean out the bathrooms, has the chance to say, "Look. I love those girls, and I would do anything for them. But I won’t do that."
A lot of people (see the link at the bottom of the page) thought that this movie was stupid, probably because they thought the Spice Girls were stupid. This isn’t true. Their music may be stupid (great, but stupid), but they aren’t, and neither is this movie. The bit about the Pope is ingenious and funny, and there are so many of the small touches that make a smart comedy. My favourite part comes near the end, when they run out of special effects money.
So ignore the boring people who didn’t like it.