Spice World

Spice World
December 15, 1997
Columbia
Musical, Comedy
VHS
C+

This movie has of course dated badly, but let me first offer you some background on where I'm coming from, because my criticisms are probably not the usual ones.  My housemate of the time (still one of my dearest friends) was then a 21-year-old gay man who loved the Spice Girls and he'd play their music a lot.  Since I like pop music, I soon grew to like them.  I was never a great fan, but I could tell them apart.  (Well, to this day I can't remember which is Mel B. and which Mel C., but I knew their Spice identities.)  He, I, and another of his besties went to see this movie.  At almost 30, I was the oldest woman there who wasn't accompanied by a preteen daughter.  We had a blast, with the goofiness and the music.

Watching it now, when the Girls breaking up is no longer a plot complication and it's hard to remember their international popularity, what's left is a movie that did not exactly do for the Spices what A Hard Day's Night did for the Beatles one-third of a century earlier.  I want to like this movie more, at least on a camp level, but the problem is that it does not in fact present a "Spice World."  They don't dominate the screen like the Beatles did.  There are too many sideplots and side characters, with the girls offscreen too much of the time.  Even when we get to see them perform or joke around, there are too many interruptions and cuts away.  And there's a scene where the girls play dress-up, as each other and as various female icons, but much of the impact is lost when I can't tell most of them apart in long-shot.  I will say that the music remains catchy, but I'd rather watch a set of their videos, where their energy isn't thwarted as it is here.

There are lots and lots of cameos, most of them wasted, e.g. Roger Moore doing a Blofeld satire that seems feeble after Dr. Evil.  Jonathan Ross plays himself, as he did in The Tall Guy, but that's pretty meaningless to an American.  And having Barry Humphries appear out of Dame Edna Everage drag seems a little pointless.  (This is 19 years after his brief appearance in Sgt. Pepper by the way.)  On the other hand, I realize that most people don't care that I was happy to see Neil Mullarkey show up, even if it's just for one line.  Bob Hoskins is in a brief sight gag, pretending to be Ginger.  (Don't ask.)  Elvis Costello appears 18 years after Americathon, but much more briefly.

Another Americathon survivor, Meat Loaf, is, no, not a roadie, but a bus driver for the Spices.  Alan Cumming, who's usually entertainingly awkward (as he was in Emma and Romy & Michele, and as he would be again in Josie and the Pussycats), is just awkward here.  Hugh Laurie does the best he can in one scene as Poirot (where Baby Spice gets away with murder), but his old friend Stephen Fry almost steals the movie in his scene as a stern judge.

Note, the joke about a potential Clinton scandal of him tucking his shirt into his underwear became ironic by the time this film hit America.

Like animals in the zoo, as baffled by us as we are by them.

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility
January 26, 1996
Columbia
Comedy, Drama, Romance, Historical
DVD
B+

My review of the book is here:  http://rereadingeverybookiown.blogspot.com/2011/12/sense-and-sensibility.html.  On balance, I think the movie and book are equal, for reasons I discuss there.  So let me just mention a few things, I didn't cover before, in particular, the casting.  As you can see, I've tagged a heck of a lot of people, three of whom were in Peter's Friends:  Emma Thompson of course, and Hugh Laurie & Imelda Staunton, again playing a married couple, although their height difference is used for more comic effect here.  Everyone of the tagged performers, except the two Hughs and Imogen Stubbs (who is Lucy here and would shortly appear in Twelfth Night with Imelda Staunton), would be in at least one Harry Potter movie, while Grant and Jones would be in both Bridget Jones movies.

This cast cosiness adds to the feel of the movie, which is, as it title suggests, very much about thoughts and feelings.   (And Thompson, whose marriage to Kenneth Branagh was breaking up at the time, would find love with Greg Wise, who plays Willoughby here.)  With the female side of the Dashwood family in particular (Jones, Thompson, Kate Winslet, and a quite good Emilie François as Margaret), we see how much they care, not in a corny way but as if the family is central to their identities, romances aside.  Watch for instance how Edward's proposal is told not through Thompson and Grant but through the reactions of her mother and sisters.  Meanwhile, Alan Rickman gives a performance throughout the film that is more about what he doesn't say than what he does.  (And he already has developed the Snapian pauses by the way.)

The other thing I really appreciated this go-round was the scenery.  It's not as lovely as Italy in Enchanted April, but in its own understated way England (Devonshire especially) is figurative as well as literal background to the mood of the story.

Peter's Friends

Peter's Friends
November 13, 1992
BBC
Comedy, Drama
VHS
B+

This is sort of an autobiographical film, in that the cowriters Rita Rudner (who plays Carol) and Martin Bergman are married and he's British and she sometimes felt out of place with his friends from university.  And much of the cast, including director Kenneth Branagh (who plays Andrew, Carol's husband), met at Cambridge and remain friends to this day.  Branagh was then married to Emma Thompson (who plays Maggie), and Thompson's mother plays housekeeper Vera.  Hugh Laurie (Roger) and Stephen Fry (Peter) were such good friends that they would often team up on television shows together at the time.  Even Tony Slattery, who's appearing as outsider Brian, was at Cambridge.  Oh, and there are lots of Harry Potter and/or Jane Austen points on this one, but I'll get to all that in later reviews, except to say that Laurie and Imelda Staunton (here as Mary) would again play a married couple.

This discussion of the "incestuous" background is not out of place.  The movie is about bonding and quarreling and flirting in a tight-knit group, and how (not) to deal with outsiders.  It is a witty if sometimes crude movie, very quotable (especially Andrew's lines).  The drama sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, but the film never ceases to be watchable, which is saying a lot for something that is almost solely dialogue.  The cast works well together (with Thompson probably the stand-out), although I will say that Slattery fan though I was and am (it was a pretty big thrill to see him be both goofy and naked), his later scenes don't really work.  Also, the script is a bit cliched and Peter's big reveal (at midnight on New Year's) doesn't pack the wallop it did twenty some years ago.

But there is an added poignancy, seeing the cast when they were relatively young (mostly mid 30s).  When I first saw the movie at 24, I couldn't relate to the feeling of not having accomplished all you'd imagined in your youth.  And I laughed my head off at the opening credits, seeing all those faces of '82 to '92 (yes, including Salman Rushdie), while now it's a time capsule, no longer a look at the recent past.  Similarly, the soundtrack was then filled with the hits of a few years before, and now (while still as good as ever) it is more definitely golden oldies.  In short, the movie doesn't mean what it did before, but then nostalgia never does.

Remembering