Kanye Stars in Spike Jonze-Directed Short Film, Hallucinates, Pulls Furry Rodent out of His Stomach and Vomits Rose Petals
6/26/2009 By Jason Schreurs

Filmmaker Spike Jonze and hip-hop hothead Kanye West made more than few heads turn at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, when they surprised festival attendees with the debut of a short film called We Were Once a Fairytale.

The Daily Swarm has posted a rather lengthy and detailed plot synopsis of the 12-minute film, so over to them:

In the film, Kanye plays himself drunk at a club acting belligerent and boastful, telling starstruck club-goers that the song playing in the club is his. He wanders into a side room where he encounters a beautiful woman. They start having sex and then he passes out on her leopard print dress. When he comes to, he finds himself in the VIP room with his pants down — he was hallucinating and fucking the pillow. The realization startles him and he rushes to the bathroom where he vomits what look like rose petals.

Then it gets weird.

Kanye finds a bowie knife in the bathroom and cuts into his stomach, spilling a torrent of more petals. He digs in the knife deeper and then with his hand rips out a small furry rodent, like a demon, only its quite cute. When Kanye realizes it’s connected to him with an umbilical cord, he pulls it hard, ripping it out of him for good. He then puts the demon on the sink and hands him a tiny bowie knife to fit the critter’s scale who then uses it to commit hari kari.

The short, written and directed by Spike Jonze, walks the fine line between self aggrandizement and self mockery that runs through all of Kanye’s endeavors. But the filmmaking is on point, with cinematography and sound design that authentically renders that feeling of being really disoriented in a nightclub. One doesn’t need to love Kanye to love the film, but the Jonze short takes what people love and hate about Kanye’s persona and then pushes it into a new, trippy realm. And in case you’re wondering, the answer is no, Kanye still can’t act. The film features the song “See you in my Nightmares” from 808s and Heartbreaks, remixed and pretty severely tweaked by Spike Jonze’s brother and N.A.S.A.‘s Squeak E. Clean (Sam Spiegel).

Supposedly the film was completed less than 24 hours before it screened at the L.A. festival and was shot in January over the course of two days. In March, Jonze’s production partner, Vincent Landay, told MTV News that the film was a companion piece to West’s “See You In My Nightmares,” although not “necessarily [a video for “Nightmares,”] but the song is featured in it.” The duo of Jonze and West also teamed up last year’s snazzy video of “Flashing Lights,” perhaps the most remixed song in recent memory.
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