Initial thoughts: Spice World is the perfect hangover film and human civilisation peaked with 1990s Cool Britannia London. I also forgot how many celebrity cameos there were in this and how post modern/meta the whole plot was, and I think I'm going to force some of the kids to watch Spice World on Boxing Day. My unexpected favourite scene after the Spice Bus jumping Tower Bridge was Ginger Spice and Scary Spice arguing about chess, although the flashforward to motherhood, the costume photoshoot and finding the bomb on the Spice Bus are definitely up there. The credits sequence is hilarious. Also it's entertaining how outlandish the Spice Girls outfits were at the time, but young people dress quite like them today (rather than how normal people dressed in the 90s).
I could go on. The main point of the film is a corny but sweet message about "girl power", specifically about the Spice Girls disregarding a show at the Royal Albert Hall to support their friend who's having a baby and has been abandoned by her boyfriend. There's some things are a
little bit iffy like Baby Spice (although her getting bribed with a milk chocolate magnum made me snort) and that Ginger Spice's entire character is basically "aggressive tart" but honestly I can't really criticise it, the film is pure serotonin. It's also incredibly inclusive of LGBT for the 90s, the girls party with drag queens in the Ministry of Sound and Richard E Grant's assistant/love interest wears an AIDS ribbon.
Bonus screenshot from when Ginger Spice is asked if she likes boys and responds "is the Pope a Catholic?"
It turns out that Spice World podcast episode is only a 10 minute preview. Devon chose the film, and he and Alice are enthused about it, whereas Ollie mostly tries to chip in. He claims that the reason there's 5 Spice Girls is because it's from "before the global financial crisis, so that's the sort of ridiculously profligate thing you could do". I will agree that it was weird seeing Victoria Beckham before she was fully Victoria Beckham. They make some noises about Mel B being Scary Spice because she's black. Ollie namedrops the fact that he went out drinking with "friend of the show" Alan Cumming (who he also hung out with in Paris). Without powerlevelling, I'll just say that getting to meet Alan Cumming and going drinking with him is not actually that difficult, it turns out. Devon points out that this was Alan Cumming's favourite film to work on. Ollie comes in with the groundbreaking insight that there's a lot of class/media analysis in this film, which is something the film explicitly hammers home over and over again.
