Una coppia perfetta

Off the wall romantic comedy with one of the strangest plots I've ever seen. A middle aged man who still lives at home with his entire family falls for a woman 20 years his junior. This causes tension within his family, especially with the domineering father, a real tyrant. This guy is well into his fifties and still lets his father tell him he can't bring a woman home with him as though he were still a teen. Very weird family. The woman is a real loser type who needs a man to feed off of emotionally. They haven't got a chance. Very entertaining film with lots of shrill singing sequences and some good, and at times bizarre, dialogue. Great ending as the camera shows us the perfect couple after the rice has fallen from their hair and then pans over to the other perfect couple cynically revealing history in the process of repeating itself.

I loved this movie from the first time I saw it. Sure, it's basically a new take on Romeo and Juliet, but it's still a good flick. The music is undoubtedly the best part {especially when "Bobbie" sings 'Lonely Millionaire (swoon)}--if Keepin' 'Em Off the Streets were a real band, I'd be their biggest fan.

Does anyone know how I might get a copy of A Perfect Couple?

Possibly Altman's least well known theatrically released film, done in an era where he was making a lot of duds. Personally, I don't consider any Altman films duds – they're all interesting, at least. And this one is no exception. It's a quirky romantic comedy starring Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin. Dooley comes from a stuffy, old-fashioned Greek family steeped in classical music, and Heflin is a rock singer living in a hippie commune. The two meet through a video dating service, and the film depicts their rocky road to love. Altman's direction is very good, as usual, the script has a good palindromic structure, and I quite like the original songs. One big problem that I had is that Dooley comes on way too strong on that first date and the day afterward, almost creepy. Not a great film, but certainly a film that shouldn't be as forgotten as it is.

Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play a most decidedly IMperfect couple in Robert Altman's version of a romantic comedy. His claim at the time (justified) is that Hollywood had always allowed only beautiful people to fall in love, so he wanted to make a romance with a couple of ordinary folk. He succeeded when he found the paunchy Dooley and the distractingly skinny (nearly anorexic) Heflin for his leads, but the film itself is not much of a success. This came out during Altman's "experimental" period, meaning he threw together some disparate elements and hoped for the best. Actually, it's quite accessible for Altman, considering "Quintet" came out in the same year, and it's one of his least Altman-like projects. Unfortunately, it's those very qualities that also make it one of his least interesting and ugliest from a purely visual standpoint.

The film does boast some good if dated music though, performed by the real-life band Keepin' Em Off the Streets, led by Ted Neely, most known for playing the role of Jesus in the film version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (and whom I saw perform the role on stage in a touring version).

Grade: C

"Nashville" represented a critical and commercial high point for Altman. He followed it with a series of films that puzzled the critics and alienated his already slender audience (the critics loved his overlapping dialogue and generally unhappy endings but audiences didn't). "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "A Wedding", and worst of all, "Quintet".

Altman was running out of studio backing and critical support. He had never really been a money maker and by 1979 with "Jaws" and "Star Wars" Hollywood had discovered the special effects summer blockbuster. It was tired of auteurs like him and Bogdanovich and Coppola, particularly auteurs who didn't make money (auteurs who remain the darlings of the critics like Woody Allen and Scorsese and don't cost too much money are OK.). Altman needed to show Hollywood that he could make money.

"A Perfect Couple" and "Popeye" were Altman's attempts to make movies he hoped would reach out to the general audience and be hits at the box office.