Purely Joyful Movie!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I have a BS in Merchandising and a love of fashion history, so this movie hits it home for me. As a kid of the 80s, I saw this on HBO/Cinemax probably 15 times. I was just hitting puberty when it came out and I wanted to jump inside that movie and live it. Jamie Lee looks phenomenal (would love to know her training and diet program pre-production) and Marilu is just adorable as the very sweet Sally- there's usually one Sally in every group of gals. I recall step aerobics being huge at that time and Jazzercise but this is very dancy- like the off Broadway production of HipThrust! The Musical. Frankly the aerobics they show is injury-inducing and I really feel for their hip flexors after all that thrusting during production. Back to the movie, I really would love to see more of this club and the background characters. In the opening sequences of the club introduction, there are several racquetball courts, a café area, food and pro shop. The health club in my hometown looked *just* like this, so much so, I think they modeled their club after this movie.

SPOILER: "The Hitcher" (young C. Thomas Howell) and "Risky Business" came out, Wes Craven was doing his "Nightmare on Elm Street" series...so what did we young people have for drama? This.If you need a laugh now, you may want to tune in. While Jamie Lee Curtis tries to elevate this, it is simply not elevate-able.Laraine Newman and Marilu Henner are gym groupies with no self-esteem, (Marilu gets the Chippendale man though, so it's all good). John Travolta as a semi-literate writer at "Rolling Stone". (We know he is good, because in the end he goes to jail for protecting a source). There are some scenes with Jann Wenner and Lauren Hutton, apparently the then in-crowd, at a party.The really sad part about this is that there really were people like this; the gym was a sense of self-esteem;(along with anorexia). Aerobics class became the next singles hang-out as the song "Masquerade" blares out, while everyone obsesses over plastic surgery and the perfect body (The Laraine Newman character is particularly pathetic). We see the superficiality. Has anything changed? Indeed, they could remake this with Jessica Simpson as the lead. Someone get on the phone to CAA!.

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.

Being that I was in my early 20s I remember very well the 80s, which was I need to be perfect decade. Smarts took a back-seat to buff & tan. Everyone was pumping iron, getting tan, blow-drying their hair, checking their look in the mirror, and flaunting their bods. Gosh! Darn! It sounds exactly like South Beach today!! Nothing has changed!What is a shock is how badly John Travola and Jaime Lee Curtis have aged. They were both so "perfect" in 1985. There's no excuse for a "sex-Symbol" like Johnny T. to have gotten so bloated and out-of-shape. Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Travolta. However his best work(aside from Pulp Fiction) was made in the late 70s and early 80s-Carrie, Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Urban Cowboy, and even for its time, Perfect. And Jaime Lee was so beautiful, so well-built, and so sexy. Oh well, thank goodness for videos.Funny how today's generation thinks the out-fits in this film were so strange. I look at the out-fits today and I think they are really "stranger" than anything we wore in the 80s.