a movie!" during a dinner conversation, with the blind leading the blind after that? Or did it begin during one dinner conversation and get bigger with recurring get-togethers, with the brainstorming involving the girls saying things like “we should make a movie where Ginger makes out with an alien, Meatloaf plays a tour bus driver, and we help out a friend give birth.”

No point in speculating further, because I don't think it's all that necessary we know the details of how the movie came to the fore. Spice World, erroneously referred to as one of the worst movies of all time, takes place on a different solar plane, one perhaps named Spice World, where the less sense there is, the better. The film is set in the present day — in this case 1997, a few months after the release of the Spice Girls’ debut album — and covers the 72 hours before the troupe is set to headline Royal Albert Hall. That's the most straightforward thing about the movie. 

Spice World isn’t a documentary. I’m curious what it might have looked like had it been one. Was it as fun to be a part of the group as this film portrays? The five “girl power”-espousing feminists, as portrayed in the feature, get along famously; they joke cuttingly yet lovingly, and every non-member they interact with is met both with jovial snark and a smidgen of vulnerability. How much truth permeates here?

We like watching these inflated versions of this quintet move about life. The bizarro Spice Girls are constantly taking endearing jabs at themselves — forever self-aware. “Should I wear the little Gucci dress, the little Gucci dress, or the little Gucci dress?” Posh Spice, a.k.a. Victoria Beckham, asks her bandmates rhetorically. Sporty Spice, a.k.a. Melanie Chisholm, rides on an exercise bike on the tour bus to pass the time, asking us, with just her grimacing rictus, if she’ll ever get to live her name down. At one point Baby Spice, a.k.a. Emma Bunton, who’s clutching a dum dum and who has her snow-blonde hair done in two high pigtails, wonders if she’ll have to keep up the sexy infant routine past 30. 

In Spice World, the band embarks on adventures that might more precisely be described as misadventures. This is a Saturday-morning cartoon of a movie. In 92 minutes, screenwriter Fuller and director Bob Spiers pack in a boat chase, a lark in a haunted house, and of course that can-you-believe-it-happened performance at Royal Albert Hall. There’s a side plot involving a madcap newspaper owner, in the William Randolph Hearst style, obsessed with chipping away at the Spice Girls’ reputation to sell tabloids. The girls are also chased by a shiny-headed stalker, a man trying to make a documentary about them without their consent, and a couple of cineastes who relentlessly pitch an idea for a movie they have in mind to the group’s eternally imploding manager (Richard E. Grant).

The best set piece in the movie is an all-out action stunt. The group's tour bus, racing against time, must get over the Tower Bridge before it goes vertical for a tugboat below. Victoria takes the wheel from Meatloaf — who’s gone missing — and floors it. The bus manages to hurtle over just in time. The gag is that when the camera goes outward into a medium shot, we’re seeing a miniature of the bridge. The bus, a classic British double-decker, has transmogrified into a toy.