A Tasty Hi-Cal Pop-Tart to Go

By RICHARD CORLISS

EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY

Directed by Julien Temple

Screenplay by Julie Brown, Charlie Coffey and Terrence E. McNally

It's been a rough day for Valerie the Valley Girl (Geena Davis), manicurist at the Curl Up and Dye hair salon. Her icky beau Dr. Ted (Charles Rocket) hasn't made love -- to her, anyway -- in two weeks! "At the rate we're having sex," she pouts becomingly, "we may as well be married already." She has discovered Ted in a compromising costume with another woman and responded by trashing their condo: microwaving his football, toasting his funny cigarettes in the VCR, dropping his gold watch in the Disposall. And now, she notes, "there's a giant blow-dryer in my pool." Well, a UFO actually, with three horny, color-coordinated aliens (Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans) itching to spend the night. Valerie had better listen to her cute boss Candy (Julie Brown): "Sit down. Relax. Have a mental margarita."

That is sage advice for viewers of Earth Girls Are Easy, the movies' first postmodernist musical comedy. This divine diversion is best approached in a fruit-cocktail state of mind. With its amiable aliens getting their pop culture out of a TV set and its hydraulic surf bunnies singing "I can't spell VW but I got a Porsche, / 'Cause I'm a blond," Earth Girls sounds like a quick mix of E.T. and Beach Blanket Bingo. But it's really a revved-up tribute to postwar Hollywood style: the vulgar vitality, the supersaturated colors, the new aristocracy of teen taste. Gaud is in the details here. A glimpse in Valerie's refrigerator reveals a package of lo-cal Pop-Tarts; the movie is a hi-cal Pop-Tart to go. At the Deca Dance disco, a teenybopper flashes past wearing earrings cut from American Express cards. "They're my dad's," she confides in a gag that doesn't waste a millisecond of screen time.

If the film's tempo comes from '80s MTV, the story is straight '40s MGM. Like On the Town, Earth Girls sets three naive voyagers down in a bustling American fun world (the San Fernando Valley) for 24 hours of dance and romance. This is, after all, a love story about people from two different worlds. Or, as Davis explains to Goldblum, "You're an alien and I'm from the Valley. We may not even be anatomically correct for each other."

Earth Girls is a movie that takes its cues from sources as disparate as The Wizard of Oz and Chantal Akerman's avant-garde French musical The '80s. But everything blends neatly in the witty, zippy script; everybody has a good time. Davis, a living windup doll, plays Everygal to Goldblum as he exercises his ingratiating leer. Carrey (a randy mime) and Wayans (with his turbo terpsichore) give unearthly pleasure. So does Earth Girls, the tastiest thing to come out of a space program since Tang.