Spiceworld: The Movie

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General		Extras
Category	Spice Girls	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1997	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	89 minutes	Other Extras	Featurette - "Spiceworld Interviews" (21 mins) Cast & Crew Biographies
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Selection then Menu
Region	0	Director	Bob Spiers
Distributor	Polygram	Starring	Spice Girls Richard E. Grant Roger Moore George Wendt Barry Humphries Alan Cumming Meatloaf
RRP	$34.95	Music	The Spice Girls

    What....you want a plot? Sorry, there just isn't one. Well, nothing that could be coherently described as a plot, anyway. The target audience of this movie won't realize this, but what we get is a collection of music videos very very loosely tied together around a number of dismal subplots.

    To give you some idea of the looseness of the subplots, some of them involved;

• A snooty bumbling reporter, Piers Cuthbertson-Smyth (Alan Cumming) filming a documentary on the "real" Spice Girls. He wanders about with his moronic crew, bumping into things and falling over a lot.
• A spitulous newspaper mogul, Kevin McMaxford (Barry Humphreys) whose goal is to break up the Spice Girls so that he can sell more newspapers, and his associated super sleazy press photographer.
• An impotent, stressed out manager - Clifford (Richard E. Grant).
• A bizarre quoter of nonsense played by Roger Moore who is supposedly the big Chief.
• A very pregnant friend of the Spice Girls who goes into labour whilst dancing at a nightclub.
• A movie producer (George Wendt)and writer following Clifford around pitching Spice Girl movie ideas at him which he keeps rejecting until, surprise, surprise, they pitch the idea for this movie to him, and he agrees.
• Aliens that have heard of the Spice Girls and want their autographs (whilst they are in the bush looking for a place to pee). I'm not making this one up, honestly.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced. There is also a Full Frame version of the movie on the other side of the disc.

    The transfer was not quite as sharp as some that I have seen recently, but was certainly quite acceptable. Shadow detail was good, though most of this movie was shot very brightly lit.

    The colours were reasonably rendered in this transfer, though at times they tended towards oversaturation. There are a lot of bright, highly saturated colour fields to be seen, and there is never any colour bleeding or chroma noise to interfere with the perfectly clearly rendered and vibrant colours.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some moderate aliasing in a few scenes involving the Spiceworld bus or other cars, and some wide shots of London landmarks, but this was not too bad. More film artefacts than I expected were present, although they weren't particularly distracting.

Audio

    Dialogue was hard to hear at times, especially over musical background. However, the dialogue was pretty trite, and so little is missed because of this. The early part of Chapter 12 suffers from what appears to be very bad ADR work as much of the Spice Girls dialogue is out of sync. The opening titles also suffer from either quite ordinary ADR work or more likely just bad lip sync work.

    The music is mostly Spice Girls songs, with a few others thrown in for good measure. They are suitably boppy numbers, and I must admit that I actually like some of their songs. The movie was much better when they were singing rather than trying to deliver their lines.

     The surround channels were used mainly for music, though some ambience made its way into the rear channels. This made for a moderately enveloping soundfield.

    The .1 channel was used to support the music and the odd special effect.

Menu

Featurette - Spiceworld Interviews

Cast & Crew Biographies

    The video quality is of reasonably high quality with only minor problems.

    The audio quality is of reasonable quality, but dialogue is somewhat hard to hear at times.

    The extras are limited, but more comprehensive than what I have seen in the past for Polygram discs.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
18th January 1999