Prisoners of the Casbah (1953)

There are countless Technicolor gems amongst the forgotten Hollywood studio pictures of the '50s. Prisoners of the Casbah is one of them, produced by Sam Katzman during his time with Columbia. Prisoners is one of those gorgeous Arabic epics, full of vibrant colours, sword fights, and pretty harem girls. There's always a scheming vizier (Cesar Romero), of course. One wonders why Sultans and Emirs bothered appointing viziers, since they always turn out to be evil. There's a twist with Prisoners: the lovely Princess Nadja (Gloria Grahame) is a spoiled brat and she's totally infatuated with the vizier Firouz rather than our brazen hero, Ahmed, the Captain of the Guards (Tuhran Bey, a favourite of mine). While the Emir would like Ahmed to marry his daughter and take the throne, the Captain despises the loathsome woman as much as she despises the playboy Captain. These twists on the format are refreshing and open the representation of genders and the various other format stereotypes to scrutiny.

The visuals, whether by the intuition of the director or a conscious creative decision I can't say, affirm Nadja's potency and her initial presumption that she is master of her own destiny. While the Emir and Ahmed try to discuss to whom she will be wed, they remain still in the shot like part of the furniture. Nadja, on the other hand, darts around the frame, slinking around her father, then over to give a barbed aside to the Captain, then back to her father. Her control over the frame is such that once she manages to bring Ahmed into her father's disfavour by rejecting her, the shot closes in on Nadja and her father, leaving Ahmed offscreen, literally 'out of the picture.'

Prisoners could almost be said to be more about the breaking of a headstrong woman's will than about overthrowing a usurping vizier. While there is a climactic sword fight, the movie's real climax is when Ahmed, infuriated by Nadja's continued sympathy for Firouz, despite everything he's done, throws her over his knee and delivers unto her pretty rump a sound spanking. At this moment she falls in love with Ahmed and they begin to kiss. It is a truly startling moment. All along Nadja has had a very distinct view of masculinity: ambitious, bearded, serious, dominant, and, most importantly, potentialy violent. It's made clear early in the movie that Firouz is more just than merciful, a serious man who believes in totalitarian order. Nadja seems oddly drawn to men who will punish her and dominate her.

Whether her vibrant presence within the frame ceases post-spanking, whether Ahmed builds his kinetic force within the frame before he spanks her, and how other characters might relate to these visual motifs, is something I, alas, became too caught up in the enjoyable plotting to discover and I didn't manage to record the movie. It's a subject for future study. Nadja isn't the only 'strong woman' character in the film; indeed, the Queen of Thieves tends to dominate her husband with glances. Her character would also need to be observed. Perhaps the visual information I noted above is a mere fluke or perhaps the intuition of the director for mise-en-scene persisted throughout.

Prisoners is indeed heavily plotted for such a short film (the runtime is 78 minutes). Nadja is to be married to Ahmed, then Ahmed falls into disfavour for refusing and is dismissed. Just then Firouz sends some of his men to hold the princess hostage so he can rescue her and appear the hero, but the plan goes wrong leaving Firouz thinking her killed both the Emir and Nadja. But Nadja is of course alive and with Ahmed. Nadja doesn't want to be with Ahmed and resists him, while he tries to protect her and seeks shelter within the Casbah--a citadel in Algiers within which was a society of criminals that couldn't get out but would also let no-one in. That covers the first thirty minutes. It's rare to see so much narrative packed within a short feature and that movie still maintain an elegant visual style. Generally such a balance is reserved for Val Lewton's productions.

It's curious how in Arabian-themed pictures, thieves are often romanticized. In crime pictures, bank robbers and mobsters tend to be romanticized; in Westerns it's outlaws. Each genre tends to have its criminals to offer as underdogs with an interior code of honour more reliable than the conventional and externally-imposed code within the bounds of the law. In this film, it is only the den of thieves that offers protection from the dangerous government of Firouz. Perhaps it is in the spirit of Jean Genet: crime is liberating, makes one's spirit free. Laws of any kind enslave one to an authority. The thieves are here represented without a hint of cynicism. They're the sort of people you'd like to have a drink with. It's a sign of the sort of innocence in storytelling that seems lost these days, but is wholly present in Prisoners.

I'm a fan of such small but glamourous Technicolor epics as Prisoners of the Casbah. It's a shame so many of them remain undistributed. Were it not for heroic networks like Turner Classic Movies and, in this case, Drive-in-Classics, these movies wouldn't be seen at all. The Adventures of Hajji Baba is another obscure, Arabian epic that deserves viewing. It was made a year later and is similar in its charms.

The Limits of Control (2009) - 2.5/4

Much to the delight of old Romantics like myself, there have been two strong anti-political cinematic statements in 2009, both by well-established filmmakers. These are Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino) and The Limits of Control (Jarmusch). Tarantino asserts the power of entertainment over politics and his film is so entertaining it triumphs over some of the most hardened hearts, save for Armond White and a few die-hard politicals. Jarmusch, on the other hand, asserts the power of art over the pragmatics of life, of which politics is of course a subset. Jarmusch, however, does not make his film itself a great work of art, and for this reason his message, to which I am entirely sympathetic, fails.

I have oversimplified Jarmusch's mission with The Limits of Control. To do him justice, we shall have to gird our loins and wax philosophical. There is a French philosopher-sociologist by the name of Bruno Latour. Latour had the idea of studying science laboratories the way anthropologists would study a tribal village and see what could be learned by putting scientific practice itself under the sociological microscope. He came to the conclusion, based on the data he collected, that science is more or less made up. For instance, there was no proof of the electron: it was an idea that was postulated to explain some observed phenomena and the scientific community agreed it exists. In this sense, science creates its own reality, according to Latour. Since science has something of a monopoly on truth in the west, this reality is one to which the majority subscribes. But that's not what's important. What's important is that science creates a reality. By the same token, each of the arts can be said to create an individual reality by means of its perception: music, literature, cinema. Is the reality of cinema the same as the reality of literature?

Jarmusch infuses this Gallic theorizing with the Romanticism I noted. A nameless man (Isaach De Bankole), who is either a secret agent or a mobster, travels Europe meeting one agent after another. Each agent delivers the same code phrase, then a monologue on philosophy, or science (chemistry, linguistics), or an art (music, painting, cinema), leaves a matchbox containing information, and departs. (This structure covering each of the arts, incidentally, is not post-modernism but modernism: it was previously employed by Melville in Moby Dick and James Joyce in Ulysses.) One character (Bill Murray), the only 'practical' character in the film, decries the uselessness of the arts and sciences for real life. For this character, what is not useful for practical reality is mere pollution of the mind. In this time when most critics, particularly academic critics, are only interested in a film of it displays politically relevant content, Jarmusch's point is a very pleasant one. It should be clear just by my description that the film is allegorical. Each of the monologues on an art is indeed useless to the nameless agent, whose sole purpose is collecting notes and diamonds, it seems. Tout ce qui est utile est laid, as Theophile Gautier put it. All that is useful is ugly. Each area of human inquiry is a reality of ideas worthwhile for its own sake. This is the position Jarmusch appears to be affirming.

I say 'appears to be' because it is entirely possible I missed some nuance; some ironic subtlety may have evaded my grasp. For instance, the emotionless protagonist never clearly enjoys any of the arts; he never gives any sense of enjoyment at all. On the other hand, Jarmusch gives no indication of sympathizing with this character. Rather, the characters he presents most sympathetically are the various monologue-reciting agents the man encounters, particularly Swinton's character. If I am correct, then the problem with Jarmusch's film is just that it was so very easy for me to figure out: it's too sincere. Art, and cinema is an art, arrives at truth by telling a series of lies. A series of truths that lead to a concluding truth is an argument and an argument is the substance of an essay. Jarmusch is creating an essay in cinema, but an essay that is made up of lies, that is, rhetorical tropes (allegory, metaphor, indeed the whole narrative is a rhetorical technique). While some might complain of Jarmusch being too cerebral, ironically my complaint is that he insults my intelligence. If Jarmusch wanted to write an essay on how French sociology, all influenced by Foucault, points to a new Romanticism, he should have taken his audience seriously by writing an essay with acceptable premises and a logical conclusion. This is taking the intelligence of the audience seriously. Poetry and rhetoric to establish an intellectual point is manipulation. He is trying to trick the audience into seeing the position he's taken. It's an assertion with persuasion rather than an argument. What might have been a good essay, if old news (Latour wrote his best work in the '80s), has become bad art.

Despite my displeasure with the overwhelming sincerity of The Limits of Control, I did enjoy the picture. The character who delivers a monologue on cinema (Tilda Swinton) praises particularly the non-narrative aspects of cinema. She explains that she likes moments in movies when nobody is speaking or performing significant action. I agree with her; I also enjoy quiet, inactive moments in cinema. Like her, who I believe to be a mouthpiece for Jarmusch, I appreciate the sociological and historical data to be found in cinema. As such, The Limits of Control is a delight. It is made up almost exclusively of such moments. Even the film's action has a certain passivity. A strangling occurs as matter-of-factly as a sip of coffee--for both the strangler and the victim, curiously enough.

As is often the case with films that boast an impressive cast, cries of "Over-indulgence!" can be heard from the reviewers. Art is supposed to be indulgent; there's no such thing as 'over-indulgence' in the arts. If anything, Jarmusch didn't indulge himself enough. He brings in his mind, but what about his deeper, inarticulable sentiments? The film's reception suffered the Ishtar-effect anyway. The Limits of Control is not just a "star-studded" film, though it looks that way in a list form. But a list is not the film. Watching the film, the cast does not get in the way. Rather, what one sees is a series of exquisite casting choices. Though they play small roles, Swinton, John Hurt, Bill Murray are maximally effective.

I wish very much I could say more about the visual style of the film, but I feel woefully inadequate to the task. It is a beautiful film. The cinematography and techniques are fascinating, particularly the way some shots are inverse copies of others. But as more philosophy student than film student, it takes me considerably more effort to do a visual analysis and I am clearly of the opinion that The Limits of Control is not worthy of that effort. Perhaps a clue in the visuals would reveal I have been unfair to the philosophical content of the film, but I couldn't see such a clue and, that being so, I don't see such a sincere film rewarding too close an analysis. There are better films out there making similar points to The Limits of Control and not insulting viewer intelligence in the process. I have in mind, of course, Inglourious Basterds. Good entertainment is always preferable to bad art.

Big River Man (2009) - 3/4

Sometimes the only way we can deal with impressive but utterly irrational things humans do is by mythologizing them. We transform these people into heroes. We have to rationalize their actions some way, so we impose significance where there may just be none. I'm not sure how intentional it is, but Big River Man ends up being an investigation of just that phenomenon.

The 'Big River Man' is Martin Strel, a middle-aged, overweight Slovenian man who suddenly decided to dedicate his life, or what's left of it, to endurance swimming. He's also carved out a rather unique niche in endurance swimming: he likes to swim in heavily-polluted rivers. He set a record by swimming the Yangtze, the world's most polluted river. So polluted was it, the narration tells us, he had to have his blood cleaned by machine every day because human kidneys can't handle that level of toxicity. It's not clear why Strel does this. This isn't the fault of the documentarian. Rather, it's the fault of Martin Strel. He doesn't know why he does what he does. Strel just seems to have an irrational urge to suffer and take risks. Strel's son, also his publicist, claims Strel is trying to bring attention to environmental issues. Did I note Strel's son is a publicist? The documentary undermines his claims by showing him making up statements to heroize his father's exploits. Strel, on the other hand, rarely has anything to say about his exploits: he just does them.

Big River Man's focus is on Strel's latest and most extreme swim yet: swimming the Amazon, from Peru to Brazil. It takes 70 days of swimming a several dozen miles every day. Making things even more difficult, Strel doesn't lose any weight in preparation and refuses to quit his heavy drinking. Even while swimming, his water bottles are actually filled with whiskey. It's as if he desires the event to be as agonizing an ordeal as possible. He seems to stack the odds against himself, as if desiring failure. But he's an obsessive man. He has trouble to walk each evening when he emerges from the river, yet he only sleeps for four hours each night and sometimes wants to swim even at night. The film tracks the increasingly alarming conditions of Strel's body and mind. One of the most disturbing moments is when his head is infested with some parasite and he's pretty much lost his mind, he starts hooking his head up to batteries and shocking himself. He also begins taking off swimming without telling his party, putting himself and the expedition at great risk. They ask him why. He says he doesn't know.

His odd behaviour begins to affect some crew members, particularly his navigator, a young Wisconsin fisherman. He begins reflecting on Strel as a Christ figure and explaining that the river is purgatory. Most of his ranting is annoying, but seems genuine. This struck me as one of the most interesting moments in the film, because it illustrates what I say in the first paragraph: the attempt to make sense of the irrational. The navigator believes Strel is a real hero, suffering for mankind, just like Jesus. Really, Strel is a disturbed man and if he had died in that river, his son and the navigator should both have been charged with negligent manslaughter. In fact, Strel nearly does die; at the end of the expedition he is in a nearly catatonic state.

Big River Man thus ends up being more sociologically rather than psychologically interesting. The psychology is absent because Strel has nothing to offer: he is presented as pure action and that's probably how he presents himself quite purposely. Sociologically, the heroizing and the mystic fervor that overtakes both Strel and his navigator are very fascinating. It's even revealing about the religious mind. Many of the Catholic saints, particularly St. Francis of Assisi, seemed to share Strel's madness and they too had their personal hagiographers.

I found myself wondering less, "What makes this man do this?" and more "What makes this man worthy of a documentary?" Well, his exploits are admittedly quite remarkable. But he's no hero. No more than Alain Robert, the man who climbs skycrapers without any climbing aids other than chalk dust. Both of these people risk their lives for totally self-interested achievements. Their activities yield nothing of value for humanity. As for himself, Strel squanders all the money he makes from the exploit on gambling very quickly and I wonder if he even cares about what he achieved. This makes the whole expedition seem strangely nihilistic.

Maringouin certainly gets some good footage, as well as some inane footage, and stumbles onto interesting points. However, the organization reveals a certain confusion regarding just what the film is about. The title would indicate it's about Strel, but his inscrutibility leaves his documentarian out to dry and the audience occasionally very bored. I recall checking the time--sometime I rarely do during movies--and being dismayed to find it was only five minutes since I had last checked the time. Still, while no-one studies weirdos as well as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, Big River Man is a good and fascinating look at a madman heroized by the confused.

3/4

A Currency Model of Genre Classification

A Currency Model of Genre Classification

When inquiring over the classification of species, there are solid criteria and solid facts to produce the answer. Is a whale a mammal or a fish? Like fish, the whale lives in water. However, it gives birth like a mammal. The latter fact has led biologists to study the evolution of the whale. They found that it genetically belongs to the mammal family. That's a hard fact. Film genres can't be classified so easily. Or they can be, but there's no reason for anyone to agree with you; there's no fact of the matter. There are obviously no genetic strands linking films back to common ancestors. While there are chains of influences, each film is sui generis to some extent. So how do we go about classifying genres?

Speaking as generally as possible, there are top-down approaches and bottom-up approaches. Top-down approaches are those that begin from general principles, then apply these to concrete cases. These principles will be broad criteria with which the members of the genre can be easily picked out. It would be possible, for instance, to begin with the criterion that all horror films must be designed to produce the emotion of horror within its audience. On this account, Psycho can only be considered a horror film if Hitchcock intended to horrify the audience. If, rather, Hitchcock intended to provide thrills, then it would be a thriller instead. That works for many movies. But surely propaganda films and other genres try to create the emotion of horror as well. One might reply, "But the sole purpose of a propaganda film is not to horrify." This then excludes all films that have diluted purpose, mainly horror comedies like Young Frankenstein and higher-brow horror films like Dreyer's Vampyr, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Videodrome, or even Dawn of the Dead, what with its overt social commentary. With Cronenberg it's not even clear that the emotion of horror is his intention at all so much as it is a by-product of the ideas he's presenting. These would be the challenges for a top-down approach: to either refine the principles so that they conform to intuition or to refine intuition to conform to the principles, until one arrives at a point where the genre categories would capture just what one desires, no more and no less: the state Rawls called 'reflective equilibrium.'

The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, rather resembles the scientific approach outlined in the first paragraph. One does not begin from general principles. Instead, based on the actual films, one derives certain features, a set of relevant 'family resemblances', with which to identify the groups to which each film belongs. As with the scientific approach there may also be an historical aspect. This would necessarily involve bringing other media into the investigation, since the horror novel predates cinema. For sake of discussion, we'll only take account of cinema. Returning to horror, the bottom-up approach would look for relevant family resemblances that unite horror films. Let us take as our set of family resemblances the following: tendency to inspire fear and revulsion, characters who experience terror, death, and monsters. A set of family resemblances of this sort can then be taken as either sufficient or necessary for counting a film a horror film. Thus one's criteria or principles are derived from the concrete cases. To say these are necessary is to declare that any film not sharing full family resemblance is not properly of the genre; it merely has characteristics similar to this family. To say these features are sufficient to make a film a horror film but not necessary means there could be films that have some of the features and not others. This would deal with films that are only half within the genre, like Young Frankenstein. Of course, one will begin to run into problems then. If Young Frankenstein is partially horror, then why not the recent Monsters vs. Aliens? It has monsters, obviously. The challenge here is to tweak the set of family resemblances so that there are no obvious howlers. It would be silly to end up calling Titanic a horror film because of the death and the suspense experienced as the ship began to sink; the family resemblances would require tweaking for sure.

The approach I favour is, to keep in the same schema, bottom-down (I guess). I don't believe it's necessary to refer to general principles at all. Let's begin with an example outside of cinema: currency. Money is imaginary: it's pure abstraction. The currency we use are just pieces of paper or coins that indicate an amount of money. These pieces of paper have currency because just about everyone accepts them as valuable. You don't have to worry about a shop saying, "I'm sorry, but this is just a piece of paper. I disagree with you that it's worth anything." There are also cases of a currency of ideas. Take the film Ishtar. More people think Ishtar is a bad film than have ever seen Ishtar. Through the tireless efforts of the critics, Ishtar simply gained currency as a bad movie. Currency is gained through repetition and repetition of agreement to the point that there is no fear of having to defend one's position. You need never worry about defending your view that a five-dollar bill is worth something. It's not an opinion of yours, it's a commonly held view. (Granted in the case of currency there's also the authority of the State.) Similarly, you needn't worry about having to defend the position that Ishtar is a bad film. It has currency as a bad film, so if you express the view that it is a bad film most people who have heard of Ishtar will assent. It's a safe commonly-held opinion on which to rely. Comedians use currency all the time. George W. Bush has currency as stupid, Hitler has currency as evil, Ronnie Corbett has currency as short. This makes these people easy references for jokes on stupidity, evil, or shortness. Comedians require this communal assent: the audience must be on the comedian's side.

I think we have a decent notion of what currency is now. What relevance does it have to genre classification? The approach I favour toward genre classification is that whatever films have gained some currency as one genre or another is sufficient. This approach privileges practice over theory. Where the top-down and bottom-up approaches had to rely on principles of some normative character, my approach is purely descriptive. This is like a dictionary. Good dictionaries contain an "ain't" entry because it's a word people use; it doesn't matter if it's a 'proper' word or not, because it's not the place of dictionaries to tell people how to speak, but to tell people how people generally do speak. Similarly, I think of genre classifications not as telling people how to categorize movies, but as telling people just how people do categorize movies. The importance of currency is filtering out idiosyncrasies. Just as with a dictionary, not just any word anybody says gains an entry. It is only words that fall into general use that gain an entry.

One can only discover what is in currency regarding genre classifications through discourse. There is no controversy discussing The Exorcist as a horror film. You can call it such without having to defend this view. It has currency as a horror film. If horror fans and scholars of the genre can talk more or less uncontroversially about Silence of the Lambs, then it clearly has some currency as a horror film. Similarly, if they rarely or never speak of Blue Velvet in any way other than peripheral, then it seems to lack the currency. Mulholland Dr. is a film that, while sometimes spoken of as a horror film, certainly lacks currency in that it is an opinion one will usually have to defend.

This approach puts considerable faith in common intuition. However, was that not always the case? In the top-down approach, I ended by noting the theorist will have to bring intuitions and principles into equilibrium. Because what good is a theory that classifies a lot of films as horror films when nobody else is willing to accept this view, let alone make use of it? Similarly, the bottom-up approach is based on finding resemblances in films we already intuitively consider as horror. So why not circumvent the notion of principles altogether and rely on intuitions? Everyone will have their different reasons for classifying the genres of films and usually they themselves will not be explicitly relying on intuition. My approach allows all of those reasons to contribute to defining the genre. If someone can successfully defend their position that Mulholland Dr. is partially a horror film, each repetition will yield stronger currency. It's up to individual tastes to decide what has sufficient currency in discourse; to decide, that is, when disagreement with the classification proposed becomes more idiosyncratic than the classification itself.

The guiding notion behind this approach is that genre itself exists for the sake of discourse. It is a pragmatic notion for the sake of discussion in all its forms: criticism, advertising, etc.. A theory of genre that yields idiosyncratic results is without value for discussion. Discussion requires some points of agreement. As Wittgenstein rightly pointed out, one cannot have a personal language. Language is for communication and communication implies, even at an etymological level, more than one interlocutor. Genre ideally is one of those common points of agreement. While some discussions on the boundaries of genre and the location of some films within one tradition or another are fruitful indeed and even necessary, it seems to me best to rely on a currency model of genre classification, which ultimately means relying on the intuition and basic understanding of cinematic traditions the full film-discussing community possesses as a group. It's a democratic view in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: most appropriate to a democratic medium like cinema.

Who Is KK Downey? (2008) 2.5/4

The thing about hipster-dom is that any attempt to out-hipster the hipsters still leaves one a hipster. Rebelling against hipster trends is precisely what a hipster would do. Indulging in hipster trends is also precisely what a hipster would do. It's a perverse trap. A trap Who Is KK Downey? both satirizes and is caught in.

Who Is KK Downey? is about two upper-middle class young slackers who are trying to become artists. The drug-using and hard-partying Terry wants to be a punk rock star; Theo Huxtable (no, not that Theo Huxtable; this one is a chubby, blond, white guy) wants to write a brutal, sex-filled, neorealist novel. They combine their talents, creating a hard-lived fictional author of Theo's book, the enigmatic KK Downey. KK is the ultimate hipster, appealing to all the 'scenesters', launching the book to A Million Little Pieces-style fame, except with underground credibility. (Think Harmony Korine with Oprah Book Club support.) The new fame and fortune naturally has adverse affects on our protagonists.

There's a subplot involving Terry's archnemesis, the cultural elite hipster Connor......... Rooney. He's so pretentious he insists on the pause. His profession is rock critic and possibly douchebag, although he's so extreme a douchebag he becomes a sympathetic character: this is a guy who masturbates to pictures of Enlightenment authors. Not only that, but despite being a douchebag, he's the only guy to correctly realize KK Downey is a phony. He may be an envious, narcissistic hipster, but he's right. And if there's anything to be learned from the existence of people like Dale Peck, it's that even tenth-rate human beings can sometimes be right.

The writers, Darren Curtis, Matt Silver, and Pat Kiely, (who incidentally also play Terry, Theo, and Rooney respectively--plus Kiely and Curtis direct) have a few targets for their satire. Hipsters and the publishing industry are the main targets. As a satire of the publishing industry, it's a bit contrived. I think they overestimate the influence and power of the literary world. They get the notion of the author as commodity right, but that's not really new. The commodity is for the hipsters and that's where the satires works best. These young authors clearly know their scenes well, because they have some stingingly clever scenes at hipster expense. These moments of high-brow humour were the most successful in the film and got the most laughs out of me. There are occasional minor targets as well. Downey's appearance is, oddly enough, nearly identical to Karen Black's disguise in Family Plot. This feminine appearance allows the writers to pick on gender theorists too.

Most of the lower-brow humour falls flat. Not because it's low-brow, but rather through a lack of ambition. If you're going to do low-brow, go over-the-top. Sometimes they did and then it was very funny. But for the most part they seemed to think a fellatio reference would be sufficient. It's not.

There are also many scenes where it appears the writer-directors weren't sure whether they wanted serious or humourous. The result is that I couldn't take these scenes seriously, but they didn't make me laugh either. There are even humourous scenes that should be taken seriously to work, but the implausibly artificial characters (Rooney sports a pompadour and speaks like Ian Buchanan) detract from the needed reality. Satire requires an anchor, or it loses conviction; this film needed more anchorage.

There's a moment when the Theo character interrupts an opera to discuss a business deal with his agent and introduces KK Downey. This is really what the film is all about: the commodification of art interrupting the enjoyment of art. On another level, it's about the enjoyment of art interrupting the enjoyment of life, normal, mundane life. A hipster comedy that offers a triumphant affirmation of bourgeois humanism? That's hitting the right Marx. So quit Stallin and go rent Who Is KK Downey? It's far from perfect, but it's a truly independent anglophone picture from Quebec that is witty, stylish, and offers a charmingly human story.