Review of Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) by Edith N — 23 Jul 2009

Long, Long Ago in a Valley Far, Far Away.

In the days when MTV was new, there was a show called [i]Just Say Julie[/i], an exception to the playing of music videos. This is, of course, very different from the current version of MTV, where music videos are an exception to the playing of shows. At any rate, this one starred Miss Julie Brown, the funny one, as opposed to Downtown Julie Brown, the obnoxious one. I really remember very little of [i]Just Say Julie[/i] (I'm blocking Downtown Julie Brown), but I have very clear images of the episode with Jeff Goldblum. He was something of a minor star at the time, in those days not long after [i]The Fly[/i], and he was on the show . . . well, they pretended he was on the show for innocent reasons. He was a friend of Julie's was, I think, the explanation given. Which we all knew was crap, of course, not least because of the sheer number of times the phrase "Earth girls are easy" came up. It wasn't as if we weren't going to figure it out; it wasn't as if they were expecting us not to. It's one of the ways it was actually a very clever show. We were in on the joke.

Valerie (Geena Davis) is going to be getting married. However, Ted (Charles Rocket), her fiancé, is not as pleased at the prospect as he really ought to be if he's going to go through with it. On the day our movie starts its descent into madness, Valerie tells her best friend, Candy (Miss Brown), that they haven't had sex in two weeks, and it doesn't look like the lean spell will be over any time soon. We are then treated to Ted's telling the guys at the gym that he just doesn't feel attracted to her anymore. Candy has worked this out, so she decides to give Valerie a dramatic makeover. Valerie's supposed to be at a convention or something, but she takes the fruits of her makeover and stays home to surprise Ted. Who surprises her by having brought a nurse home with him. She kicks him out and spends the next day in despair, or at least that's the plan until the spaceship crashes in her pool.

I'm not going to tell you that Jeff Goldblum is ripped in this, because it isn't quite true. However, he's certainly not lacking in muscle; it's just that he's more wiry than ripped. At any rate, when Candy finishes with [i]his[/i] makeover, it's no wonder that Valerie has to stop and take a breath. Oh, Wiploc (a young Jim Carrey) and Zeebo (a young Damon Wayans) are kinda cute--also in very wiry ways; no one in this movie really has a huge, impressive physique--but it's Mac (Goldblum, of course) who draws the eye, or at least my eye. And Valerie's. What's more, he's a more thoughtful, more intelligent figure than the other two. It's Wiploc and Zeebo who crashed the ship looking for girls. It's Mac who really comes up with solutions. It's also Mac who gets hurt by being trapped in Valerie's horrible codependent relationship with Ted. This is not helped by the fact that he's the most thoughtful, intelligent person in the whole film. I mean, who's his competition, Val's middle-aged surfer pool boy Woody (Michael McKean)?

I think people would expect this movie to make me homesick, or at least nostalgic. But this is a life I never led. For starters, I didn't live in the Valley. Oh, I lived in [i]a[/i] valley, but I lived in the next valley over. (Though my first boyfriend lived in the Valley.) I like this movie, but it's kind of distant from my experiences. Heck, I didn't even see the movie when it first came out. I'm pretty sure it was one of Mom's summer movies a couple of years later. Then again, Mom was never as much into Miss Julie as we were. She thought it sounded silly and not requiring much thought, and Gods love her, it was true. This is not a movie that provides valuable insight into anyone or anything. I'm not sure how many people, even in the eighties in the San Fernando Valley, ever lived this life. It's an image we have that I think is not built on much. These people have horrible hair and clothes and nails, which is true enough, and they do have a certain California thoughtlessness, but a lot of the rest of it is off.

When dear Miss Julie got married to her now husband, he'd never heard of her. (I'm not sure if that would have been refreshing or embarrassing.) This meant she had to explain to him what she did for a living. It would have been one thing for the inferior Julie Brown--"I'm snobbish and obnoxious as I introduce music videos." But this is a woman who first really came to most people's attention with the classic "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun." She also wrote this, which seems pretty apparent to people who have seen her other work--one of these days, we'll get to her [i]Medusa: Dare to Be Truthful[/i]. It's not even that she's just a comedic actress. It's that she's kind of a comedian in a Weird Al-ish vein. She doesn't so much anymore, but there was a stretch of time wherein Julie Brown pretty much parodied the life we were as a society living at the time. It's not out on video, but she did a thing that was a parody of the Bobbitt situation and the Nancy Kerrigan thing. She'd have to have shown him things; it's not a career you can really explain in words.