Is "Southland Tales" a worthy follow-up to "Donnie Darko"?

If you’re like me, the Easter Bunny never quite looked the same after watching “Donnie Darko”, a surreal coming-of-age film about a guy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who, after a jet crashes into his house, starts to take direction from a huge evil rabbit named Frank, and begins to see glimpses into the future. Anyway, director Richard Kelly’s latest apocalyptic work, “Southland Tales”, panned at the 2006 Cannes, reworked, and re-incarnated, is already drawing renewed criticism from the likes of Andrew O’Hehir of Salon, who writes in Beyond the Multiplex:

Once the nonsensical helter-skelter of Kelly’s plot surrenders to its concluding set piece, when most of the characters take flight in the Baron’s enormous Mega-Zeppelin, pursued by twin brothers Ronald and Roland Taverner (Scott and Scott) in a flying ice-cream truck that may cause the universe to implode, “Southland Tales” finally achieves the loony, mystical pop-culture dream state it’s been laboring toward for two hours. Like the best moments in “Donnie Darko,” these scenes are majestic, evocative, ambiguous and willing to risk being ridiculous. We see Boxer, his wife and Krysta perform an elegant, ménage-à-trois dance number. We hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” done in Spanish, backed by a discordant, modernist string quartet. We hear several different people utter variations of the line “I’m a pimp. And pimps do not commit suicide.” We are wowed by Kelly’s long, sweeping, Scorsese-style traveling shots through the Mega-Zeppelin’s ice-blue ballroom. Even the movie’s juvenile obsession with fellatio becomes funny at last.

I swear to god, reading that paragraph made me think I was really, really high. Maybe this movie is worth seeing…