SPICE WORLD (38)

Directed by: Bob Spiers

Starring: The Spice Girls, Richard E. Grant, Roger Moore, George Wendt

The Pitch: It's the Spice Girls! There's five of them! And they're singers! Well, sort of...

Theo Sez: "Based on an idea by the Spice Girls and Kim Fuller," say the credits, which sounds about right - it takes all five of them to have an idea, and even then they need help. Not that the film tries to disguise its heroines' bimbo credentials, having them babble on about star signs and Gucci dresses and treating even their status as Empowered 90s Women with irreverence ("Yeah, Girl Power, feminism, d'you know what I mean?" gushes Scary without much conviction during a photo-shoot) ; indeed, what's fascinating about it is the way it tries to re-position them, toning down their aggressive edge, having them comfort people (a pregnant friend, a little boy in hospital) and turning them from fearless amazons into victims of the various men running their career. Even if the model is A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (as claimed in the hype), that at least had the Beatles more than holding their own against the the various handlers and media-vultures trying to control their lives ; here, the handlers are running the show, from the bits of unabashed spin-control (dismissing the rumours of a Spice Girls split as tabloid fabrication) to the many showbiz jokes (movie pitches, earnest documentary-makers), appealing to a media type's sense of humour but surely above the heads of the band's prepubescent fan-base. It's no surprise when, in what was presumably intended as a clever bit of post-modernism, the plot of the Spice Girls movie being pitched within the film takes over the film itself - merely an acknowledgement that there's no such thing as the "real" Spice Girls, that everything is manufactured. It's rare to find a film so unembarrassed about its phoniness - you almost feel a little sorry for the Girls, turned into a consumer product and apparently (unlike, say, the Monkees in HEAD) unaware of the joke ; then again, in an amusing Moebius-strip kind of twist, the film does paint its heroines as pawns, so maybe it is about the "real" Spice Girls after all - even though, by definition, the real Spice Girls don't exist (because the Girls are pawns, so that everything is manufactured, etc etc). It's pretty bad, but intriguingly so.