Movie Reviews : ‘Earth Girls’: Through the Eyes of Extraterrestrials

“Earth Girls Are Easy” (citywide) takes place in Los Angeles, but it’s L.A. through cracked sunglasses with purple stardust frizzies on the lens.

The movie is a jazzy, snazzy rock-musical comedy about a dumped-on Valley Girl who ushers three girl-crazy extraterrestrials around town after they crash-land in her swimming pool. And its virtuoso director, Julien Temple (“Absolute Beginners”), turns Los Angeles into a candy-frosted, slick dream mall, where Melrose Avenue, the San Fernando Valley and Ocean Avenue seem to have swallowed up everything.

The city is creamed over visually with Temple’s wit and impudence. He’s like a guy who dreamed up Los Angeles out of TV and movies and then went out and found all the places he dreamed: found the nutty drive-ins, goofball specialty shops, the huge plaster doughnuts, the palm trees slashing the smoggy sky. He’s even found Angelyne, the puffy-bosomed blonde in lavender sunglasses whose only raison d’etre seemed to be her omnipresent L.A. billboards--she pops up here as a sultry bimbo in a BMW.

It’s the look of the movie, supposedly filtered through alien eyes, that’s special. But the core of “Earth Girls” is too easy: slick fluff that’s been ingeniously lacquered over, a mix of Valley Girl shop-and-chop sarcasm and cutie-pie sci-fi effects with the laid-back, benignly trashy mood of an old beach party musical.

The script and four songs were co-written by Julie Brown, MTV’s resident put-down specialist, as a vehicle for herself. Instead, Brown’s part, Valerie the dippy manicurist, went to Geena Davis, with Brown recast as her girlfriend, boss of the Curl Up and Dye hair salon. The rest of the cast is equally anachronistic: Michael McKean as a burnt-out surfer and pool cleaner; Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans as the aliens from Jhazzalan, and ex-”Saturday Night Live” bad-mouth Charlie Rocket, as Valerie’s faithless boyfriend, looking something like Dan Quayle as a sour-faced yuppie swinger.

Brown’s songs are cute; as Temple stages and shoots them, they’re the high spots of the movie. But the movie is a weird hybrid. The visual satire is ingenious and even entrancing, like an old ‘50s Frank Tashlin comedy or a musical number by Stanley Donen and Bob Fosse. But the verbal humor has a mean, sluggy tartness, like the condescending cracks of rich kids at the hicko culture of the local styleless boobs.

Temple has a weakness for this kind of humor; he’s a wealthy Cambridge boy who must have liked the punks and rockers for their freedom and contempt for authority. But, sometimes, he seems to lack the real populist flair that a pop-music specialist needs, and this may be why, except for his superb rock videos, he hasn’t caught the public fancy yet.

In the end, though, the visuals triumph. “Earth Girls Are Easy” may be a classic case of a director getting more out of his material than it really deserves. Temple has spectacular gifts for making musical movies. He is a witty formalist, a light-hearted virtuoso, and, like all the best movie-musical directors, he’s able to create images that breathe in tempo with the songs or cut against them jaggedly, exhilaratingly.

There is one terrific example of that here: “ ‘Cause I’m a Blonde,” a bimbos-on-the-beach satirical number in which Julie Brown redeems herself for all the script’s lazy one-liners and its paucity of invention and real style. She gives the number a languorous, wooly-headed self-infatuated buzz, and Temple makes the air around her crackle. “Earth Girls Are Easy” (MPAA rated PG, despite sexual innuendo and partial nudity) may be the weakest piece of material Temple has had to work with, but he transforms it anyway. In his hands, the whole style of this movie becomes an apotheosis of glitz.