Word: earthly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY...
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...
...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...
...nature of his triumph, though, is elusive and peculiar. Larkin and his contemporaries inherited the scorched earth of modernism -- the towering shadow cast by Yeats, the multilingual complexities introduced by Eliot and Pound, the daunting technical virtuosity of Auden. Starting out, Larkin had the good taste to imitate all these (except Pound), with some Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. He got out from under his predecessors only when he learned to lower his voice, to submerge complexities of thought and feeling beneath a serene, limpid surface...