Spike Jonze and Kanye West: 'We Were Once a Fairytale'

Kanye West "didn't keep a low profile long," said Christopher Farley in The Wall Street Journal. The hip-hop star has been under the radar since interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards last month, but reemerged online Sunday night in a short film directed by Spike Jonze called We Were Once a Fairytale (watch here). The "surreal" 11-minute video stars Kanye as himself, and follows the rapper as he "attends a party and acts obnoxiously—cursing, stumbling around, and throwing up in a bathroom."

"If this is what a night out is like for Kanye," said Simon Vozick-Levinson in Entertainment Weekly, "I feel bad for the guy." Was this video some kind of premonition? It was shot in January, and "certainly his experiences after this film was completed make for a provocative context." But I'm not sure I'd call We Were Once a Fairytale a great video—it's just hard to "look away" from.

But Spike Jonze achieves "the impossible with this short—he makes Kanye West seem almost human," said Jessica Barnes in Cinematical. We Were Once a Fairytale reminds "us that there's probably more going on underneath Kanye's surface than we give him credit for." And this video takes a "very strange (and somewhat disturbing) turn," proving once again that nobody “makes movies like Jonze."

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