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It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is unlike any Altman movie I have ever encountered. No snarkiness, no clever dialogue, no overlapping story lines. This is just a nice, simple love story. Paul Dooley is nice as a middle aged man still controlled by his father. Marta Heflin was a harder character to pin down. Maybe it was because I was only concentrating on her excessive thinness (her next role cast her as a concentration camp victim, if that gives you some idea), but I couldn't get a read on her at all. Her face was fairly blank, but her voice was outstanding! She belongs to a communal singing group led by the insanely talented, and so sexy, Ted Neely! We see many of the bands (Keepin Em off the Streets) songs performed in their entirety, and it is fantastic! I will be scouring the internet for copies of their music! Overall, sweet love story,with some nice sibling relations thrown in, but the reason I will keep coming back is the music!

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.

"A Perfect Couple" comes from a period when Altman was trying to make films through his own Lion's Gate company with financial backing from Fox (courtesy of Alan Ladd, Jr.). Working, in the main, with very slender budgets, he seems to have been trying to do work that could break even financially even when the films didn't expand much beyond the small audiences that most of his movies had typically attracted. In the end, the effort failed. He was rapidly losing the support of even critics who had long been sympathetic, and the audience for small, experimental films was drying up.Most of the films from the Lion's Gate/Fox period have a flimsy undeveloped quality to them. His work from M*A*S*H to Nashville had all started from someone else's script even though most of those films would do little more than retain the basic structural elements, the rest being altered/improvised during rehearsal and actual shooting. But he had something to work off, react to (or against) and build from. By the time of "A Perfect Couple," Altman's name was showing up as screenwriter (usually in collaboration with someone from a previous film) which is a fair indication that these movies started shooting with little or no script at all, just an idea, some characters, and some sense of where it all should go. The financing was there, and he had to take advantage of it, hoping to pull something off on the spur of the moment. It worked with "3 Women," but he was less successful here and in "Quintet." Paul Dooley is a middle-aged divorced man living at home where his life is ruled by his rich father (since they're Greeks, his father is naturally played by Titos Vandis). Marta Heflin is a shy aimless young woman who's a member of a rock band and lives with them all in a kind of self-contained community in a downtown L.A. loft. They meet through a computer dating service, come together, fall out with each other, come together again, and fall out. Most of the film deals with their efforts to kindle a romance in spite of the obstacles placed in their way by the respective family groups each belongs to.Altman seems to have intended a culture clash comedy, and, in some ways, this film grew out of "A Wedding" in which Dooley and Heflin both had roles, and where Altman set two dissimilar families against one another with fair results. Here, though, the cultures that clash are both sketched out so quickly, and with such broad strokes, that "A Perfect Couple" could play as self-parody, if self-parody were so obviously not intended. Dooley makes the best of it. He's able to find (or create) funny moments, but they're just moments. There's not enough here for them to integrate into any kind of whole. Heflin is less successful, but then her character is, in general, so passive that there's not much character to play.Not much develops here because so much time is given over to the rock band (Keepin Em Off the Streets) that Heflin belongs to. Every time the film starts going somewhere, we get another song that's played out to full length (and there are 11 of them in the movie). The band was formed by Altman cohort (and "Perfect Couple" co-screenwriter) Allan Nicholls, and "A Perfect Couple" seems to exist as much to showcase the band as to tell the film's story. Maybe the thought was that if the band (or any of its songs) hit, that would be enough to propel the movie to some kind of success.In the end, the movie was dismissed by most as a light curiosity, and it went nowhere. If it's interesting, it's interesting as an experiment on Altman's part to exist in the commercial mainstream making quick, cheap movies that wouldn't need to bring in large audiences to succeed. But Fox, after a management shake-up, lost interest in Altman, and he lost their financial backing before Lion's Gate was able to make anything that succeeded (even on Altman's terms). Altman, for his part, would spend most of the '80's making even smaller, less expensive films in an effort to keep his hand in.

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?