What I watched today...

This morning I was having a conversation with my friend Mark about something that had nothing to do with anything. We could have been talking about the elections in Iran, but alas we were talking about the limitations of perfection. Actually, we were mentioning it. We never got around to a full-blown discussion, but what we getting at was the idea that a certain raggedness can be much more exhilarating than a work of perfection. This was a digression upon which Mark added another digression: "Better to be perfect than 'Perfect.'" I knew exactly what he meant, except I don't think I entirely agreed. Mark doesn't know this, but I like "Perfect," partly for its badness, party for its baldness. Here is a movie that managed to combine magazine journalism, the fitness mania of the early 1980s, and the synth-soul of Jermaine Jackson in one John Travolta-Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle.

When either of these two - or, for that matter, any two people in this movie, especially Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner more or less as himself - speaks, it's a travesty of language. But when Curtis teaches her popular class and Travolta attends it (he's writing a cover story), the movie crosses over from ridiculous to sublime. In this scene, Curtis, who has always seemed asexual to me, comes on to Travolta. He can't take his eyes off her - and not because she's the instructor but because, like the handful of people of who dared to see "Perfect" when it came out in the summer of 1985, he probably can't get over how attractive the Scream Queen is when her volume is turned down.

The pelvic thrusts, hula-hoop gyrations, and waist bends are a joke. But watch how the director James Bridges lets the scene go on for over four minutes of longish takes of closely framed movement (the cinematographer Gordon Willis takes his job her very seriously) until the joke turns into something else, something ridiculously but inarguably hot. Travolta wants her bad (look at his shorts). There is more in "Perfect" where this came from, and such scenes are often are suggestive enough to obviate the need for much other dialogue.

I was talking to Mark (yes, him again) the other day about how the 1980s were an interesting decade for commercial Hollywood moviemaking. The films weren't always good, more rarely were they deep. But the surfaces had their pleasures. At that time a revolution was underway. The soundtrack, in tandem with the music video, had changed the movie musical so that the songs told the story without the actors having to sing. The bodies on the other hand - they wouldn't shut up. In this scene from "Perfect," the song is "Shock Me" by Jermaine Jackson and some whippersnapper named Whitney Houston, and it would be a totally obvious choice of music were the sexual connection bogus or the and aerobi-dancing not so dirty.

It's impossible to imagine Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds getting into anything like this.