Hot on the heels of the box office domination of his Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze has released a short film he made with Kanye West and it’s… strange. Called We Were Once A Fairytale, the ten minute short (with some mildly NSFW moments) seems to begin like one of those arty 90s music videos – you know, where the music takes a back seat to the dialogue and story – and then really becomes one of those arty 90s music videos – you know, the ones you can only see on The Director’s Series DVDs, and that played on MTV one time, as part of the ‘Making Of’ special about the video that MTV would never play.
Kanye West plays Kanye West, a lonely, sad, fucked up drunk hip hop artist at a bar just trying to ‘make a connection’ (ie, get laid). Then he cuts himself open, finds the soft cute thing in his center and forces it to kill itself. I don’t know if this is self-critique – I’m unsure at this point if Kanye is capable of self-critique (the South Park ‘fish joke’ episode really summed up my feelings on Kanye at this point, although I do think he’s a musical talent almost unparalleled in the modern world). At any rate it’s an intriguing ten minutes, if only for the part where a white guy mistakes Kanye for Lil Wayne.