Perfect (1985)

This movie isn't really a stinker but i get bored very quickly : first, I have never liked Travolta as an actor and this movie doesn't change my opinion. Next, the story lacks focus and pace: Travolta writes 2 stories at the same time, it's a news movie, a love movie, nearly a judicial movie and maybe a comedy… It's really too much for a poor actor like Travolta and the aerobic study isn't really interesting : sure it says it's a bit silly as ordinary people doesn't really need to train like professionals but the members are too crazy… What's left is a good Jamie Lee who really gave all her sweat for this part, the feel of the 80s with the first computer and really great cars and fashion

Definitely not awful, but I can see why its raved as being so. It's your typical superbly cheesy 80s flick that we've all seen and loved. Travolta portrays a young Rolling Stone reporter who's sent to LA to uncover a major drug case. He agrees to do so, but sees it as an opportunity to write another story on fitness clubs being like singles bars of the 80s. He tries to make both stories big successes while trying to woo a fitness instructor (Jamie Lee Curtis), who's had a bad experience with newspapers and reporters. Travolta, Curtis and the chicks rom Taxi and SNL are the only good actors in the whole thing, the rest sucks. Plus the script is bad and the exercise sequences are cheesy. It's so funny, ya gotta love it.

PERFECT reminds you of precisely what you wanted to forget about the mid-80s, including the movie, itself. That's why so many are uncomfortable with it, myself included.Yes, Jamie Lee looks lovely (though she'd go on to look much better -- and much healthier -- in subsequent films), and it's fun to grin along with Travolta and the Tent in His Shorts in that entirely-too-long "hot aerobics moves" sequence.. But PERFECT is useful for one thing and one thing only, being an send up of East coast pretentiousness and presumptions about the "Los Angeles"/airhead image. Oh yes, and it's probably the only film on earth to mention the ABSCAM scandal of 1980. Give it two stars for that, alone. There's a not-so-subtle gay undercurrent running through PERFECT be it the impromptu Boy George Fandom conference at the hotel, the pretty blonde fruits prancing around Sport Connection and incredulous "Chippendale (i.e. homosexual) boyfriend" of the aggressively heterosexual Sally; or the purposely genderless introduction of Jessie's "swim coach" rumor. Be honest: you wait with bated breath until the movie provides you with the sigh of relief that the swim coach was indeed male. It could have been worse: all that memory trauma could have been over an allegation of...lecherous PE teacher LESBIANISM...(gasp, the horror!)Before you tell me I'm imposing today's standards on yesterday's film, consider that these were pertinent issues, particularly for gays and gays-to-be, even (perhaps even "especially") in 1985.But I found myself actually agreeing with the central message of the film, as articulated by that hokey Travolta analogy on pop culture and individual dreams. Diagnosis: if PERFECT is any indicator, the "California"/LA image is the fantastic, mass-marketed product of the very people claiming to critique it from such an "objective" distance. Whatever it's funny-ha-ha flaws, anyone over age 35 is acutely aware that we're really only laughing at ourselves, our active denial of blatant, obvious 1980s in your fact homosexuality; our long-spent cans of sparkly rouge, styling mousse, and L'Oreal; synth bass and gated snare dance lines, the wrong-then-and-wrong-now spandex, and pushbutton on-screen/zero-chemistry heterosexual promiscuity.PERFECT is the warped mirror back in our face. That is precisely WHY it was such a monumental failure at the BO. Two stars for that part, too.

OK, I know this is a bad, bad movie. It's not like I have any "diamond in the rough" illusions about this actually being a good movie that's merely misunderstood. So why is it that I watch it every time it's on? I honestly love watching this film!Maybe it's the dated 80s setting and the "studly" guys that look utterly homosexual now. Perhaps it's the great lines, like Anne De Salvo looking directly into the camera and saying, "C'mon, guys, make me suffer," or Matthew Reed (in his one and only screen role) saying, "It was love at first sight. I took one look at those tits and my whole body got hard!" It could be John Travolta going through his aerobics routine with a sock in his jock, or Larraine Newman straddling the leg-spreader, proving that not every woman looks sexy in a leotard.Of course there's Jamie Lee Curtis calling Travolta a "sphincter muscle" three different times. There's also Jann Wenner gyrating his fat gut during the closing credits. How about the pointless scene where hundreds of Boy George fans storm the hotel, or Curtis "deleting" Travolta's article by merely backspacing (What kind of word processor is that)? There's even the premise that Rolling Stone is a serious news magazine - HAW HAW HAW!I seriously can't recommend paying money for this, but it's worth a watch if it comes on a local channel just for the sheer badness of it all. This is the definitive nadir of Travolta's career (check that...it is better than Battlefield Earth, but what isn't?) After this, even Look Who's Talking Now looks brilliant.