After 1980's Urban Cowboy, John Travolta's career began to cool off. A lot of bad choices leading to roles in bad movies for a good decade plus stretch. 1985's Perfect finds Travolta at the beginning of the downward slide.
I remember the massive tie-in this movie had to Rolling Stone magazine and all the pre-release publicity said magazine gave via a cover story and Travolta interview. Made sense, in that Travolta's character is a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine and real-life Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner is featured in the film as the publisher (although for some reason inexplicably named 'Mark Roth' for the screenplay - why Perfect just didn't have Wenner play himself by name is a mystery). Never saw the movie in theaters but saw it a bunch of times on cable tv a year or so after it bombed at the box office. Rewatched it recently for the first time in decades and despite what Quentin Tarantino said about the movie being "vastly unappreciated" I think Perfect deservedly underperformed financially.
A large part of the problem is that Perfect is all over the map. Mostly in regard to the overall tone. Whatever message or point the movie may have wanted to make concerning journalistic ethics or the differences between how things are portrayed in the media versus reality is obscured by the charmless, snarky, vain manner on continuous display by virtually every character in virtually every scene in the movie.
It starts off with Travolta trying to get an interview with a businessman facing trial for selling drugs. Travolta finds that he needs to go to Los Angeles to have any chance at getting the interview, thus he and his publisher decide to simultaneously research another story while out in LA. The topic chosen is health clubs and how these venues are becoming spots for members to hook up romantically. The movie takes a very New York City point of view (NYC being where Rolling Stone magazine was based) in that anything worthwhile, hip, smart and ironically cool only happens in New York City while California (particularly LA) is full of sun-bleached, self-absorbed airheads who deserve only to be made fun of.
So, off to California goes Travolta. He befriends the owner of a successful LA health club and gets full access to the club membership based on the disingenuous premise that he intends to write a complimentary article about the health club as opposed to the article he actually intends to write. He gets introduced to several club members and employees, begins hanging out with them, learns about their personal lives, acts as if he likes them (all the while knowing he intends to do a hatchet job on them in print) and on and on. The movie moves from one scene to another, most of them depicting the wacky, unconventional lives of these California twentysomethings who work out together, live together, sleep together, etc. Travolta meets Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays an aerobics instructor at the health club. Curtis has a few skeletons in her closet, is wary of talking to reporters and reluctant to get involved with Travolta. Travolta and Curtis do (naturally) get involved. Travolta begins to rethink how he wants to write his story on health clubs, opts to go for a less salacious slant, submits that story to the magazine, his publisher rewrites the story placing a heavy emphasis on the hookup nature of the health club.
As I mentioned, the tenor of the screenplay clearly wants the audience to identify with the jaded New York view on the wacky Californians. In truth, when watching this recently, what struck me was how glib, dismissive and downright cruel the New York viewpoint was. Apparently, the ethics of Rolling Stone magazine amount to little more than exploiting people's desire to see themselves in print by using that desire to gain access to their lives, use the subjects of the stories under dishonest pretenses and then go on to write titillating articles because...hey, sensationalism is what sells. I found it more than a bit difficult to empathize with that anything goes if it sells media integrity ethos, much less translate that into anything approaching sympathy for Travolta's character. Clearly, we're supposed to think Travolta's life is somehow above or better than the lives of the health club members, even while for most of the film he is bent on little else other than writing about them in a nasty way, getting his article published and moving onto the next interview subjects.
The subplot of Travolta trying to interview the businessman drug dealer bubbles up here and there throughout the flick, eventually culminating in Travolta being jailed for contempt of court for refusing to turn over tapes of an interview he did with the businessman on First Amendment grounds. A subplot which further illustrates Travolta's reporter character has no concerns for anybody other than himself, unless it was supposed to illustrate Travolta was capable of taking a principled journalistic stance, a stance which rings hollow in lieu of how his interview subjects at the sports club (people who invited him into their homes, lives and - in the case of Jamie Lee Curtis - their beds) were ultimately treated in print.
Perfect concludes with an upbeat ending which rings particularly (and falsely) hollow considering the vast bulk of the movie which preceded it. The pathetic part is how seriously the movie takes itself juxtaposed by the fluff it ended up with onscreen. Outside of Jamie Lee Curtis seductively gyrating in a leotard, there is little else in Perfect which is pleasant to watch, much less memorable. Perfect COULD have been a memorable movie about something other than a series of glib, superficial images. Instead, the film opted for a script and scenes which try to stimulate the viewer with the very sexualized images the movie is supposedly disdainful about. What could have been a dramatic commentary on how sex and gossip is all the media cares about because that's what sells instead becomes a bunch of forgettable, meaningless sludge. A movie to be laughed at regarding the lack of self-awareness in which it promotes the very thing it is supposed to be against, chock full of mostly poorly-behaved people treating others as things to be used up and discarded.
I remember the massive tie-in this movie had to Rolling Stone magazine and all the pre-release publicity said magazine gave via a cover story and Travolta interview. Made sense, in that Travolta's character is a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine and real-life Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner is featured in the film as the publisher (although for some reason inexplicably named 'Mark Roth' for the screenplay - why Perfect just didn't have Wenner play himself by name is a mystery). Never saw the movie in theaters but saw it a bunch of times on cable tv a year or so after it bombed at the box office. Rewatched it recently for the first time in decades and despite what Quentin Tarantino said about the movie being "vastly unappreciated" I think Perfect deservedly underperformed financially.
A large part of the problem is that Perfect is all over the map. Mostly in regard to the overall tone. Whatever message or point the movie may have wanted to make concerning journalistic ethics or the differences between how things are portrayed in the media versus reality is obscured by the charmless, snarky, vain manner on continuous display by virtually every character in virtually every scene in the movie.
It starts off with Travolta trying to get an interview with a businessman facing trial for selling drugs. Travolta finds that he needs to go to Los Angeles to have any chance at getting the interview, thus he and his publisher decide to simultaneously research another story while out in LA. The topic chosen is health clubs and how these venues are becoming spots for members to hook up romantically. The movie takes a very New York City point of view (NYC being where Rolling Stone magazine was based) in that anything worthwhile, hip, smart and ironically cool only happens in New York City while California (particularly LA) is full of sun-bleached, self-absorbed airheads who deserve only to be made fun of.
So, off to California goes Travolta. He befriends the owner of a successful LA health club and gets full access to the club membership based on the disingenuous premise that he intends to write a complimentary article about the health club as opposed to the article he actually intends to write. He gets introduced to several club members and employees, begins hanging out with them, learns about their personal lives, acts as if he likes them (all the while knowing he intends to do a hatchet job on them in print) and on and on. The movie moves from one scene to another, most of them depicting the wacky, unconventional lives of these California twentysomethings who work out together, live together, sleep together, etc. Travolta meets Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays an aerobics instructor at the health club. Curtis has a few skeletons in her closet, is wary of talking to reporters and reluctant to get involved with Travolta. Travolta and Curtis do (naturally) get involved. Travolta begins to rethink how he wants to write his story on health clubs, opts to go for a less salacious slant, submits that story to the magazine, his publisher rewrites the story placing a heavy emphasis on the hookup nature of the health club.
As I mentioned, the tenor of the screenplay clearly wants the audience to identify with the jaded New York view on the wacky Californians. In truth, when watching this recently, what struck me was how glib, dismissive and downright cruel the New York viewpoint was. Apparently, the ethics of Rolling Stone magazine amount to little more than exploiting people's desire to see themselves in print by using that desire to gain access to their lives, use the subjects of the stories under dishonest pretenses and then go on to write titillating articles because...hey, sensationalism is what sells. I found it more than a bit difficult to empathize with that anything goes if it sells media integrity ethos, much less translate that into anything approaching sympathy for Travolta's character. Clearly, we're supposed to think Travolta's life is somehow above or better than the lives of the health club members, even while for most of the film he is bent on little else other than writing about them in a nasty way, getting his article published and moving onto the next interview subjects.
The subplot of Travolta trying to interview the businessman drug dealer bubbles up here and there throughout the flick, eventually culminating in Travolta being jailed for contempt of court for refusing to turn over tapes of an interview he did with the businessman on First Amendment grounds. A subplot which further illustrates Travolta's reporter character has no concerns for anybody other than himself, unless it was supposed to illustrate Travolta was capable of taking a principled journalistic stance, a stance which rings hollow in lieu of how his interview subjects at the sports club (people who invited him into their homes, lives and - in the case of Jamie Lee Curtis - their beds) were ultimately treated in print.
Perfect concludes with an upbeat ending which rings particularly (and falsely) hollow considering the vast bulk of the movie which preceded it. The pathetic part is how seriously the movie takes itself juxtaposed by the fluff it ended up with onscreen. Outside of Jamie Lee Curtis seductively gyrating in a leotard, there is little else in Perfect which is pleasant to watch, much less memorable. Perfect COULD have been a memorable movie about something other than a series of glib, superficial images. Instead, the film opted for a script and scenes which try to stimulate the viewer with the very sexualized images the movie is supposedly disdainful about. What could have been a dramatic commentary on how sex and gossip is all the media cares about because that's what sells instead becomes a bunch of forgettable, meaningless sludge. A movie to be laughed at regarding the lack of self-awareness in which it promotes the very thing it is supposed to be against, chock full of mostly poorly-behaved people treating others as things to be used up and discarded.