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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

One winner spoke for nearly all the others with his one-sentence review of last week's quiz movie-- "Light of Day is exactly what that movie should not see." Maybe it's not that bad, but it's not very good, and today the only real reason to watch it is for Joan Jett in her first feature film.

While it was sold as a Michael J. Fox movie, the real star of Light of Day was Jett. She was completely believable as a rock singer and single mom who can't handle both at once. While that description makes it sound like a role for Shirley Jones, Jett had to handle some pretty grim scenes-- lost custody, dying mother-- and was surprisingly good. I'd even say she was better than Fox, but how hard is that?

(One winner wrote, "Seeing Joan Jett in the flower of her youth was interesting-- it's hard to remember her fresh and un-weathered." Maybe so, but she seemed to be holding up pretty well in the pics of her performance at the Roseau County Fair in 2006. And she seems to be pretty accessible to her fans.)

Light of Day was written and directed by the author of Taxi Driver, and as another reader noted, "Good ol' Paul Schrader-- he couldn't make a feel-good hit if his life depended on it." Schrader may have also planned on making a slighty different movie, because he was originally counting on using a different Bruce Springsteen song for the title. Or, as a quiz winner summarized, "Springsteen was asked to write a song for the original title, 'Born in the USA,' then decided that the results were too good to toss away on the likes of Paul Schrader. Schrader got a new song and title, while the rest of us got . . . well, Light of Day."

The song is a good one, though, and Jett's duet with Springsteen himself is probably the best version of all. Joan outsings him easily-- these days, Bruce hoots and screeches like a hillbilly with a hotfoot-- but Springsteen's guitar work is the best part. I'm a longtime non-fan when it comes to The Boss, and even I like this.

Even if they didn't like the movie, a fair number of people knew what it was, so congratulations and a picture of an unweathered Joan to the following: Vince Tuss, Wayne Palmer, Song-Un Lee, John Seffl, Jim Moomey, Nancy Louise Rutherford, Bob Redwing, Shaun Faulkner, Michael Mattson, ron frigstad, Dave Mallow, Thomas Miller, Bill Hearne, Kevin Musolino, Kenneth Gramer, E. Yarber, Fred Lorence, and Denny Lynch.

Posted by Steve Monaco at April 27, 2008 10:54 PM

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