I didn’t know what to expect from this movie, but I doubt it is what I have just seen. Actually, I’m not entirely certain what I saw, though I had a great time watching whatever it was.
First thing I didn’t expect is this is a musical. Actually, almost all the musical numbers except one are in the first half-hour, so it stops being a musical around the time I accepted it was one.
Those songs are by Julie Brown, an established recording artist and a MTV personality (but maybe not the one you may be thinking of, which is Downtown Julie Brown). The songs are catchy, sharp and incisive, yet they feel shoehorned into the film. Probably the best of the songs, “Cause I’m A Blonde” is dropped into the picture so unexpectedly that it’s like somebody briefly changed the channel to MTV.
But where to start discussing what the movie is? The plot is simple enough: Geena Davis plays the world’s tallest valley girl. She is engaged to Charles Rocket who, in keeping with the characters he plays in every movie I have seen him in, is a sleazeball who constantly cheats on her. One day, a spaceship lands in her pool and she befriends the alien crew within. The chief of the crew is Jeff Goldblum who, true to the other movies he made with Davis, will displace Rocket as her new squeeze.
Joining Goldblum as the aliens are Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans. Each alien is completely covered in a different color of fur and have helmets that look like something right out of the Dr. Suess feature The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
With a crew of three, you may wonder if Davis has an exceptionally large pool to accommodate such a craft. Nope—this craft conveniently can shrink down people to fit within the ship and then return them to normal size when exiting. This is a weird contrivance that I suspect it used to accommodate the effects budget.
This design of this spaceship epitomizes some of the bizarre visual style (well, styles) employed here. It is like a toy spaceship from the 1950’s blown up to full-size—er, almost full-size, I guess. Similarly, the ship’s interior has a theme that I can only describe as 50’s sci-fi by way of Fischer Price.
Which makes it all the more bizarre when Carrey fires up a device that generates a sexy furry dancer that Carrey and Wayans chase around the ship. This happens right at the start of the film, so we already have been overwhelmed by imagery that somehow simultaneously evokes Pee Wee’s Playhouse, 50’s sci-fi, 80’s music videos and Dr. Seuss—and then inexplicably channels the most uncomfortable scene from The Star Wars Holiday Special.
And this brings up something I found especially odd about Earth Girls Are Easy. This is a really horny movie for only having a PG rating. Heck, even PG-13 was an option at the time. I’m surprised that rating wasn’t incurred just for early scenes of Davis in a shockingly transparent bikini. Not sure why, but I felt a bit uncomfortable essentially seeing Davis in the altogether. Something didn’t feel right about that—kinda like I felt seeing Jamie Lee Curtis topless in Trading Places.
At least Davis appears to be having fun. One of the early musical numbers is all her (well, except her voice, as she lip-syncs) as she creatively destroys Rocket’s possessions. All I could think of is a bit from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt where Titus goes around “lemonade-ing”, breaking car windows and parking meters with a baseball bat. I doubt Beyonce was influenced by this movie, but who knows?
All that aside, this is a great comedy and I was tired by the end from laughing so hard. Carrey and Wayans do some of their best physical comedy here. Rounding out the cast are many actors I am always happy to see, such as Michael McKean playing a washed-up surfer turned pool guy. The dialogue crackles throughout the picture, such as a possibly ad-libbed line from McKean where he comforts somebody in a police car with, “Jail isn’t so bad. That’s where I learned how to surf”. There’s even numerous visual gags, so many that I doubt I noticed them all, but I love it that the place where Davis works is a beauty parlor called Curl Up and Dye.
This is a deeply weird movie, an odd mix of styles that never seems to fully gel. But I think the world is better place thanks to odd little pictures like this. Off-beat, very funny and strangely endearing, I know I will be revisiting Earth Girls Are Easy in the future.
Dir: Julien Temple
Starring Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans
Watched on blu-ray