fulci420’s review published on Letterboxd:
Extremely polarizing film from Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, The Box) with some seeing it as a grand dazzling satire and others as one of the worst things committed to celluloid. It made a shocking 300k on a 17 million dollar budget, and with the failure of his follow up "The Box" Hollywood officially shut its doors to him. So how bad could any movie with The Rock, Zelda Rubenstein and John Lovitz really be?
Well it's definitely a fail, but like in "The Box" Kelly provides enough visual flourishes and atmosphere to make it engaging even when the plot is so lame brained and pretentious. His dialogue here is some of the worst ever he really is trying to hard to sound smart but when he can't even explain the plot coherently in interviews it just comes off as that douche in first year university who half reads a couple of philosophy books and now he thinks hes fucking Plato or some shit.
But despite all of that when everyone shuts up this is a beautiful movie. With a score by Moby and some very well picked songs from bands like Muse, The Pixies and BMRC, this music is giving us one hell of a mood and Kelly really shines in these dialogue sparse sequences. There is a some gorgeous camera work here, a long take through the blimp party being one of the highlights. The scene cut to Memory Gospel by Moby near the end is perfection and they should of stopped it there. Watch it below in french if you want.