Perfect (1985)

Few movies could truly be called perfect.  This week, I found one.  I watched a movie that was so perfect that I needed to write about it.  This perfect movie was as perfect as a movie could be.  There aren’t too many other words to describe it.  Perfect is the perfect word to use when discussing this perfect movie.  That’s why I keep saying how perfect it is.  It is that perfect.

This week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie is 1985’s Perfect.  Adam Lawrence (John Travolta) was a writer for Rolling Stone.  He was working on an article about a computer manufacturer named Joe McKenzie (Kenneth Walsh) who was arrested for drug trafficking.  In order to score an interview with McKenzie, Adam flew to Los Angeles.  His boss, Mark Roth (Jann Wenner), said that he should write another story at the same time, so Adam decided to write about health clubs being the new place for singles to meet.  At a Los Angeles health club named The Sports Connection, Adam fell in love with aerobics instructor Jessie Wilson (Jamie Lee Curtis).  Things got complicated as his journalistic integrity clashed with Jessie’s life, and a romantic storyline was born.

Perfect was a ridiculous movie entirely fitting of the era in which it was made.  The health club concept, the clothes, the print magazine… All of that stuff has changed.  The modern world is not like that.  There are still gyms, sure, but they aren’t the singles craze that the movie showed them to be.  They are now a place for people who are crazy about health to work out.  They are places for people to get memberships and never go.  They aren’t a leisurely place anymore.

In this post, I’m going to take a look at Perfect and try to explain what made it into the bad movie legend that it has become.  I’ll try not to spoil anything.  I’ve been going too far down that route recently.  This post is going to be about the movie without ruining it.  Why?  Why would you care about a bad movie?  This should be seen by anyone with the slightest amount of interest in bad movies.  I don’t want to ruin the experience.  So, no spoilers.  (In all fairness, there are bound to be minor spoilers, but I’m not going to ruin any of the big stuff.)

Movies Based on Articles

I could cover this topic in a larger way in a future post.  This section isn’t so much about the topic itself as much as how it pertains to Perfect.  Rolling Stone helped to produce Perfect, even giving Jann Wenner an acting role (he was a cofounder of the magazine).  The movie was based on a late 1970s series of articles titled Looking for Mr. Goodbody – Health Clubs: The New Singles Bars.  That series was published in Rolling Stone.

This wasn’t the first time that John Travolta starred in a movie based on an article.  The first was a 1977 film titled Saturday Night Fever.  It was one of the movies that helped make John Travolta a movie star.  The article that it was based on was Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.  That was a hefty title that got shortened for the film.  This article was referenced briefly in Perfect.  On Adam Lawrence’s computer there was a file titled NewSatNite.  It was a small nod to Travolta’s film history, and a smart one that didn’t call too much attention to itself.

The other movie that John Travolta worked on that was based on an article was Urban Cowboy.  It was based on the article The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy.  That movie was directed by James Bridges, the director of Perfect, and was released in 1980.  It was also written by Aaron Latham, who wrote Perfect.  The three of them had such success that they agreed to make another movie together in the future.  Five years later, they would reteam for Perfect.

John Travolta’s Career Turmoil

The latter half of the 1970s and the year 1980 were good for John Travolta.  They made him a movie star.  He was one of the stars of Welcome Back Kotter during that time, but his film roles shot him to superstardom.  He had an important role in 1976’s Carrie.  He was the lead in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever.  He was the star of 1980’s Urban Cowboy.  Things were looking good for Mr. Travolta.  It wouldn’t stay that way forever.

In 1981, John Travolta was in Blow Out, reteaming with Brian De Palma five years after Carrie.  It was a critical hit, but didn’t do well in the box office.  It was seen as a failure.  He followed that up with Staying Alive, a sequel to Saturday Night Fever that didn’t do nearly as well with fans or critics as the first movie.  Two of a Kind came after that, reteaming him with Olivia Newton-John.  If their Christmas music from a few years ago is any hint, Grease was the only good thing they did together.  And finally, John Travolta was in Perfect, which reteamed him with the creative team behind Urban Cowboy.  These were four movies that saw him reteam with people he had worked with before.  None of them captured the same magic.  They killed John Travolta’s career.

After Perfect, Travolta wasn’t in another movie for four years.  He wasn’t in any movies in 1986, 1987, or 1988.  It wouldn’t be until 1989, when he was in both The Experts and Look Who’s Talking, that John Travolta’s career had any movement.  The first of those two movies is barely known, and the second spawned a franchise of talking baby/pet movies.  John Travolta wouldn’t be a respected actor again until the 1994 release of Pulp Fiction.  That doesn’t matter too much to this post.  What matters is that Perfect was the last nail in the coffin for his career.  For four years, at least.  He would eventually recover and go on to make his passion project of Battlefield Earth.  We needed that movie.

Montages

When you think of movies from the 1980s, your mind probably conjures up montages.  The cuts between different things happening.  The bits and pieces of dialogue.  The song that plays over the scene.  It’s a cliché that is commonly a truth.  Many of the movies of the 1980s had scenes like this.  Many still do.  They are transitionary scenes that allow a quick progress of character growth or story movement that should take place over an extended time.

The most prominent type of movie for montages is the sports movie.  Montages usually happen over long periods of training.  When a character has to prepare for a big match, such as any boxing match in a Rocky movie, the training can take a long time.  That’s why a movie such as Rocky IV becomes known for its montages.  As the character works out with his rocks and tires and stuff, they speed things up with a catchy song and some quick cutting to different things.  It speeds up the movie while also showing what a character did to get ready for their match.

Perfect had its fair share of montages.  The most notable was when Adam Lawrence and his photographer Frankie (Anne De Salvo) were at The Sports Connection, preparing for the printing of Adam’s article.  The scene had them setting up pictures, taking pictures, and travelling through the health club.  Laraine Newman worked out, Jamie Lee Curtis did aerobics, and some men posed around the locker room.  It was set to the sounds of Masquerade by Berlin.  This was the big montage of the movie.  It wasn’t the craziest scene though.

Aerobics

There were full aerobics scenes in Perfect.  I don’t mean that there was a scene about aerobics, with good edits, that actually felt like part of the story.  When I say that there were full aerobics scenes, there were five to ten minute chunks of the movie that were devoted to aerobics.  They were full on aerobics scenes with little to no cutaway shots.

One of these aerobics sessions, the less important one, was a simple wide shot of Jessie Wilson leading an aerobics class.  She shimmied, she shook, she got low and right back up.  The entire class followed her every move without hesitation.  Clearly, the scene was choreographed.  She barely gave direction.  Each time she switched moves, the entirety of the class would follow.  It was a synchronicity that could only happen in movies.  It was like in a high school movie and they go to the dance and everyone breaks into the same, never choreographed, choreographed dance.  Everyone knew exactly what to do.  This wasn’t even the craziest aerobics scene.

The more important scene to talk about was when Adam Lawrence joined an aerobics class.  Adam and Jessie had already started their relationship.  He had coaxed his way into her life after being shot down on multiple occasions.  His persistence paid off.  This scene was practically them having sex in front of a class full of people, without ever touching each other.  John Travolta’s sweaty, clothed penis was flopping all around his shorts as he thrusted in every which way.  Jamie Lee Curtis stared at him with lust in her eyes as the class followed her direction.  The direction of dry humping the air.  It was a sexually stimulated scene set in an aerobics class and it was insane.  It needs to be seen to be understood.

There is much more that I could go into about Perfect, but there has to come a time when I stop typing about the movie and move onto the next.  That is this point.  I need to start wrapping up what I’m writing.

Perfect is not a perfect movie.  There were major problems from the pacing to the editing to the writing.  Nothing worked the way that it was intended.  The aerobics scenes were too long and uncut.  The romance storyline was unrealistic.  It was a movie that needed a few more runs through the script and another run through the edit room in order to find something good.  I’m sure there was something good to present with Perfect.  The problem is that the movie that was made wasn’t that something good.  It was anything but.

The 1970s and 1980s spawned many movies set in gyms, spas, health clubs, and that sort of thing.  Perfect tried to be a loving tribute to those institutions while also tearing down the people that support them.  It didn’t succeed fully on either front because of its wishy-washy intentions.  That left it in the realm of 1980s movies that are terrible yet strangely watchable.  It was the perfect movie to include in the Sunday “Bad” movies, and it is a movie I would recommend for any bad movie watcher to seek out.

Something you don’t have to seek out is this list of notes:

• Jamie Lee Curtis was mentioned as one of the stars of Perfect.  She had a role in Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
• Howard the Duck was the Sunday “Bad” Movies premiere of David Paymer, who had a small but important role in Perfect.
• Perfect featured actress Donna M. Perkins.  She would go on to be in Leprechaun in the Hood.
• Candy Ann Brown showed up in Perfect after already appearing in Up the Academy.
• Finally, Laraine Newman had a decent sized role in Perfect.  She was also in Jingle All the Way.
• Have you seen Perfect?  How do you feel about John Travolta’s career?  Do you like aerobics?  Talk about anything in the comments section.  Anything.  Okay, not anything.  Talk about appropriate stuff.
• If you want to, you can suggest movies for me to watch by commenting below.  You can also find me on Twitter and let me know.  I’m always looking for new suggestions so that I can find movies I don’t know about.
• I have a snapchat account that I use mostly to share small snippets of the movies and television shows I watch.  Many times, the clips are bad movies.  If you want to see this stuff, my username is jurassicgriffin.
• Next week’s movie is going to be The Apple which is one of the most insane movies that I’ve seen in a long time.  Perfect might have seemed crazy from what I wrote here, but The Apple is far stranger.  Come back next week and read about that one.