All has been quiet in Wes Anderson world of late. But fret no further. In an interview with Chicago Time Out ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker told the magazine that he’s going to be involved with Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” which is due sometime in 2009.
“I’ve written three, four songs, and some of that might become bits of the score,” he said. And that’s all he’s asked and all we have to work with, but it’s an interesting development.
The follow-up to 2007’s “The Darjeeling Limited” and co-written by Anderson’s ‘Life Aquatic’ screenwriting partner Noah Baumbach, the ‘Fox’ will be voiced by George Clooney and the rest of the cast are familiar to Anderson-ites including Cate Blanchett, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston. This probably means we should read the ‘Fox’ script we have sometime soon.
This is not Cocker’s first foray into films. He wrote songs featuring Radiohead members (Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood) for “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” and as Chi-Time Out reminds us, he wrote a theme for the James Bond flick, “Tomorrow Never Dies” that the studio never used. “They set up a kind of American Idol situation, where they asked about nine different artists to come up with a Bond song. They listen to nine different attempts of working “tomorrow never dies” into a lyric. Consequently, I was really pissed off when they went with Sheryl Crow instead.”
In recent Anderson-ian like news, Vampire Weekend latest video, “Oxford Comma,” created very much in the Wes aesthetic with exact same Futura bold font to boot, has had the Internet up in arms. This is amusing for two reasons. One, the fact the Stuff That White People like 20-something drones would take umbrage with a band aping a filmmaker that has only made five films (is he a sacred cow already? Surely they wouldn’t bat an eyelash if “Citizen Kane” was parroted in a video). Secondly, in the recent SPIN cover story of VWeekend, the guitarist spoke at length about Wes Anderson’s films and then later asked that the conversation be struck from the record as if that might blow his cover? Don’t you have more important conversation topics to consider out of bounds? Perhaps their inflating egos as allegedly demonstrated by their SXSW behavior?
Watch: Vampire Weekend – “Oxford Comma“