Starting Up a Brand New Day

Friday might seem like an odd day for the theme of starting anew, but if you've followed my various web endeavors you'll probably understand why. Unlike with angry "I hate you" songs, of which I have surprisingly few (I see people fight and be negative all the time in my real life, so I don't need much in my recreational), of upbeat, invigorating revival motivational anthems for this kind of day I have scads. I thought, since it's early appropriately quick, why waste time with metaphors when you can make Sting sing the crucial three-word triplet? And what better luck, as a seeker of a copy of said track, than to first come across, as I did, not the studio track from the 1999 album of the same name, but rather the cut from 2001 live album ...All This Time, which is a great, bouncing, uptempo jazz version of the eerie electronic original, complete with jazz band, male and female backup singers, and of course Sting, whose voice is tailor-made for jazz. The live album was recorded on the night of September 11, 2001, at the famous concert that was an ultimately helpful gesture showing that life would go on, despite the disaster mere hours earlier.

The relevance of that to this current morning was the first flag, what I heard from our small-scale rehearsals even better, then finally the perfect relevance of the lyrics not only to my goal but to where I begin. The past is now the past, and it is time to start anew for myself personally, once again as my own individuality and solidly single.
'

"Brand New Day"

Sting

...All This Time 

A&M, 2001)

Brand New Day - Sting

Why don't we turn the clock to zero, honey

I'll sell the stock, we'll spend all the money

We're starting up a brand new day

Turn the clock all the way back

I wonder if she'll take me back

I'm thinking in a brand new way

Turn the clock to zero, sister

You'll never know how much I missed her

I'm starting up a brand new day

Turn the clock to zero, boss

The river's wide, we'll swim across

We're starting up a brand new day....

Like a Circle in a Spiral

In 1968 Norman Jewison, the man behind In the Heat of the Night, the film that one year earlier had made a legend out of Sidney Poitier (who became the first black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film) and the line "They call me Mister Tibbs!" (which later became one of the more obscure references in the 1994 Disney masterpiece The Lion King and ranks #16 on the AFI list of "100 Years...100 Movie Quotes"), followed up that success with a moderately received caper starring Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen and titled The Thomas Crown Affair. Though it received some positive remarks for its stylish visuals and direction, the promising plot turned out messily, and it became largely forgotten over the years. Then, in 1999, an even more stylish remake starring then-James Bond Piece Brosnan as the titular con artist and Rene Russo, who then in her mid-40s had (and has) never been sexier as his femme fatale insurance detective/love interest Kathryn Banning hit the screens...to an arguably similar reception, at least among the leading (read: loudest) critics and box office receipts (the film grossed nearly $125 million on a $48 million budget).*

Though much of the plot and setting was changed in the second film (which can hardly be called a "remake"), several things remained to tie the 1999 picture to its 1968 inspiration, as the latter was, after all, the height of postmodern exercise in filmmaking (see footnote). One not-so-subtle reference to the Jewison film is the inclusion of his leading lady Dunaway in an added role as Crown's psychiatrist, who pops in throughout the film to deliver an often-mocking psychoanalytic expose of the plot's goings-on. Another notable echo of the earlier film that significantly appears in the later one, though, is the tune that won the 1968 film its only Oscar, "Windmills of Your Mind," music by Michel Lagrand (who also wrote the Oscar-nominated score) and lyrics by husband-and-wife team Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman**. The song first appears as Crown and Banning dance tensely at a black and white ball - a crucial scene, and those who get the reference only have their anxiety heightened while those who don't lose nothing. Later, over the end credits, a coolly jazz-infused rendition of the song, sung by a cooly jazz-infused Sting, ends the film with the same slinky sensuality that has infused it from the moment Russo (or rather, her high-heel- and black hose-clad lower leg) first appears on screen. Sting's deliciously sexy track is one I have had in my library ever since, and always in or near the "most played" list. Hear for yourself why that might be.

Windmills Of Your Mind - Sting

* Dr. Drew Casper, film historian and renowned professor at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, has a passionate self-professed distaste for postmodern film, although he does teach a class devoted entirely to the period and style. In that class, when I took it in 2005, Dr. Casper presented the 1999 film of The Thomas Crown Affair as an extraordinarily rare example of great postmodern filmmaking.


** Alan and Marilyn Bergman have earned fifteen Oscar nominations together as lyricists between 1968 and 1995, their most recent nomination year, winning two ("Windmills of Your Mind" with Michel Lagrand in 1968, and "The Way We Were" with Martin Hamlisch in 1973). In 1982 they became the first songwriters to have three songs nominated in the same year, and unlike later composers and/or lyricists who equalled that honor such as Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, that still would have flown with the recent rule change allowing no more than two songs to be nominated from the same film, as all three 1982 nominees were from separate films (none of them, sadly, won). The duo is still alive and kicking, so one never knows if they might Streep it out to a 16th nomination!