Best movie ever!

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I guess since "The Odd Couple" was already taken as a title, Robert Altman decided "A Perfect Couple" instead. This film seems about 10 years behind the times in its story of a young woman (Marta Heflin) involved with a seemingly hippie "Up With People!" type singing group who meets the portly Paul Dooley and their strange encounters while dealing with the others' eccentric groups and family and just trying to find time to learn about each other. Another missed opportunity for a potentially challenging emotional film about less than perfect people seeking happiness in a relationship, "A Perfect Couple" is just bizarre. Heflin, who is a cross between Shelley Duvall (an Altman regular), Olive Oyl (whom Duvall would play the following year) and Laraine Newman, isn't unattractive, but her character really isn't all that interesting. Dooley, too, has some issues. While I don't mind a film focusing on the usual supporting characters trying to be a leading player rather than a character type, I just never found myself interested in their situations, mainly because they really seem to be too distant as people to really care about.As far as the actors, I did like the fact that the majority of the cast is made up with unknowns. Of the cast, I only knew Dooley (of "Breaking Away" fame), Henry Gibson, Dimytra Arlyss and Dennis Franz; The rest of them to me were totally unfamiliar, so I did feel like I was watching something fresh on that perspective. Of those unknowns, Titos Vandis stood out as Dooley's tyrannical papa, and after researching his credits, I will certainly look for him in his other work. Two scenes that will probably remain in my memory are where Dooley and Heflin are trying to be alone but are interrupted, first by Vandis and his disapproving family, and later in a hotel room by Heflin's freaky pals. For connoisseurs of Altman's work, this will probably be a curio, but for others, it might be a good idea to know the type of film you are getting yourself into.

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!

I finally got around to seeing this for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Altman film, and I must say, I was extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's also criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla, which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people with no touch of Hollywood iconography about them.The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort-of-patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a "perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people, and a near-silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that lends the film an oddly timely-contemporary touch.)The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The soundtrack was preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I recently scored a copy of this rare LP.) As many of the reviewers here at the IMDb enthuse, the music is quite delightful, and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, a lot of people (and even a dog) just hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple is a remarkably casual-positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being "special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy, well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me -- right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it again.

This is a wonderful film with an out-of-sight uncredited series of great songs. Strangely, it's not included on Yahoo's list of Altman films. Offers great insight into the adult dating scene. Henry Gibson (of Altman's Nashville) has a non-singing part. Singing cast includes one of the Neville Brothers. Think of it as Nashville with an extended boy-meets-girl plot and no political overtones.