Well, how about The Great Rock ’n Roll Swindle? The 1980 Julian Temple documentary chronicled the rise and the fall of the Sex Pistols, the only pre-fab band ever to attain hipness with people over 12. It features a lot of documentary footage, boasts from band manager Malcolm McClaren on how he managed to bilk both the major labels and the public, and contrived footage of Sid Vicious in his underwear. Of contrived footage light on clothing, Spice World, naturally, has plenty. But there are also shades of boasting; the entire movie hints at the Girls’ lack of substance, as almost everyone in it seems to wonder why, then, they’re so damn popular.

As for the plot, it wouldn’t sustain a video game, despite the fact that it inevitably will. Baby, Scary, Posh, Ginger, and Sporty need to make it to their first live gig at Albert Hall against the obstacles thrown in their way by a tabloid publisher (Barry Humphries), who figures the only thing that can sell more papers than the group’s meteoric rise is its precipitous fall. Along the way, they are visited by starry-eyed aliens, plagued by an extra-malicious paparazzo (Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror fame), and they revive a pre-adolescent coma victim with the mere mention of Ginger’s well-publicized bosom.

Not that Spice World doesn’t offer up some food for thought. Will George Wendt (who plays a movie mogul, pitching the very movie you’re watching, har-har) ever get a decent job, for example? And what with all the cameos from people you thought would know better: Bob Hoskins, Bob Geldof, Elvis Costello, and Ab Fab’s Jennifer Saunders. Clearly there’s a high-pitched note of kitschy chic in all of this that only British ears can hear.

The point of the movie (aside from making money, but I’ll get to that), however, seems to be captured in the person of a documentary filmmaker (Kevin Allen) who dogs the group in search of the “real” Spice Girls. “I want to break through the show-business side,” he tells his crew. “I want to crash right through it.” He doesn’t, of course, and his documentary turns out ruined. Because, when you crash right through the “show-business side,” there are no Spice Girls.

Which is exactly what McClaren threw in the public’s face with the Sex Pistols’ Swindle movie. There’s nothing to it but a scam. It might appear unseemly to compare the plastic puff of the Spices to the professed anarchy of the Pistols, but really they’re just flip-sides of each other. The Pistols were invented to combat the plastic puff of glam, while the Spice Girls turn it around on the truth-in-flannel posturing of post-grunge. If one of them would just murder their girlfriend in a filthy New York hotel room, we’d be onto something.