As the saying goes -- you either want a heartwarming story about a boy and the feral pack of genetically mutated, maneating Eeyores living inside him who teach him the true meaning of love, or you don't. As such, Where the Wild Things Are worked for me.
Meanwhile, that's only one of two films to come from director Spike Jonze this week about the furry goblins that lead us to behave in spoiled and irrational manners. The other is his latest music-video collaboration with Kanye West.
We Were Once a Fairytale is not so much a music video as it as an 11-minute short film, which happens to feature some outtakes from 808s & Heartbreak's "See You in My Nightmares." It was shot back in January over two days in L.A., and debuted briefly on Kanye's site today before disappearing -- possibly into the very car trunk that held Kanye in his first Jonze collaboration -- accompanied by the shady message "WE WERE ONCE A FAIRY TALE - SORRY I HAD TO TAKE IT DOWN : ( " Why West had to take it down isn't entirely clear, but the short film has been playing peekaboo online all day. Let's hope it's still on YouTube by the time you get to this, because it's something of a must-see.
We begin inside a nightclub, where Kanye has clearly had one too many Hennessy-Red Bulls and is getting off on hearing his own voice coming through the speakers -- to the point of DEFCON-1 uncoolness. Then he's curled over a starstruck girl -- "I love short girls!" -- as her imposing boyfriend saunters up. It continues this way, with West wandering around the club and striking out with other assorted hot chicks, who've clearly been instructed to react against-type to Kanye's can't-miss come-on line, "THIS IS MY SONG! I DID ALL THE NOTES!" (Seriously -- what music video background girl wouldn't find that icebreaker endlessly fascinating?)
Poor Kanye -- it seems he shall sleep alone tonight. Take it to the dancefloor, K-Wog, where he's not looking so hot and seeing triple. He wanders into a VIP room, and wouldn't you know it! He gets freaky with a hottie in a leopard-skin dress. Or is that just a couch? (We've been there, brah.) Kanye pulls up his pants, apologetically offers the couch some money for a cab home, them stumbles back onto the dancefloor and demands to know where the bathroom is. Finding it just in time, he hurls rose petals all over the mirror and sink -- sort of American Beauty meets an evening of too much sushi and all-you-can-drink Long Island Iced Teas.
Then things get really weird. Kanye produces a large hunting knife and slices open his belly, pouring forth a gush of rose petals. He then reaches into his gut and pulls out a small, furry creature attached to him by some kind of Hermès umbilical scarf. The bipedal rodent stares at him, wisftfully, and Kanye pulls off a miniature version of the same knife used embedded in the original's handle. He nods to his demon, the creature stares down at the weapon, then performs the same act of MC harakiri as his master just did.
One commenter suggests that this short film -- made 8 months before he'd become a pop culture pariah for storming Taylor Swift's moment -- as proof that the VMA event was a planned part of a greater, ongoing spectacle: Kanye's lifelong performance opera. "HOW I KILLED MY EGO - THE STORY," he writes. "WE HATE him, AND THEN feel bad for him, leading our emotions like a good story teller does. andy kaufman style.... smart."
You know what? It might be giving West too much credit, and detracting from Jonze's genius gifts of perception. But I like that theory. I like it a lot.