What makes you feel alive?
Say what you will about him, but football hooligan Clive Bissell—Bex, or Bexy, to his friends and enemies—can answer that question. It’s “the buzz.”
A young, live-wire Gary Oldman plays Bex as a kind of adult counterpart to the youths of A Clockwork Orange. He’s past any adolescent ennui, and he hasn’t yet hit a midlife crisis. He has a purpose: the thrill of violence and domination.
Almost anything else, though, conjures up an exasperated impatience, a restless overflowing of his need to bully, belittle, and win. He’s an estate agent, and his first scene sees him reeling off bullshit at a fast clip as he takes a family to a house. He uses his would-be sales pitch as an excuse to numb them with an onslaught of words, all laced with an acidic, absurdist humor they can’t make heads or tails of, and then he doesn’t even go inside. He’s charismatic enough that he can pass all this off as confidence, like he’s soft-selling by negging.
A more conventional film would have him sleepwalking through the motions here, perking up only when there’s a chance for mayhem, but The Firm keeps Bex bubbling all the time. He’s not Edward Norton in Fight Club; he is not Jack’s malaise. He’s a happy asshole who knows what he wants. He’s only frustrated when he can’t get it.1
Partway through The Firm, Bex and his gang tune into a po-faced documentary on football hooligans that explains what the film itself has been dramatizing: today’s hooligan can hold down a job and wear a suit and tie. The men boo and jeer at any attempt to paint them as mysteries, and they’re right to. Bexy has a job, sure, but not a split personality. He’s not in disguise. He doesn’t maintain upright, starchy decency except for when he slips away to commit football crimes. He is this person all the time, and the same qualities and tactics that make him an effective mini-cult leader—the insight, the bullying, the bonhomie, the cruelties passed off as jokes—make him effective elsewhere, too. If the violence of hooliganism wasn’t part of “the buzz,” if he didn’t have to chase down a confrontation with Yeti (Phil Davis), Bex could go on for years. This is Thatcher’s England, after all.
But The Firm is aware that violence necessarily begets damage. One of Bex’s men, Yusef (Terry Sue-Patt)—barely more than a kid—gets his face slashed, and only his older brother has enough perspective to be livid about it. Bex’s toddler son gums at his utility knife and has to be rushed to the hospital. You can get out, you can get lucky, you can get luckier than some, or you can get dead.
One of the best, if most on-the-nose, scenes in The Firm pairs well with a background detail, and it creates an almost poignant point about something that’s barely mentioned at all: football. At the end of the movie, the city’s hooligans—now all (temporarily) united against European hooligans—exult in their status. In essence, they say that nothing can come between them and what they love. And what they love is violence and destruction: “If they stop it at football, stop the rucks at football, we go boxing, we go snooker, we go darts.”
Football is the expendable part. That’s fine—even endearing—when it’s a bunch of guys saying that aw, shucks, watching the match is really just an excuse to spend time together. But if you strip the passion for the game, and even the partisan passion for one’s own team, away from hooliganism, you’re left with unmotivated violence, the pure buzz of “our lot” vs. “those ones over there” (no wonder the British firms shake hands for a while to deal with the interlopers). That’s the real story the in-movie documentary wasn’t covering: they’re fake fans of the sport. They’re fake friends to each other. They’re just assholes who found a good organizing principle and used it to make more assholes.
That last part is the surprisingly poignant bit. We see young Yusef getting radicalized into accepting his brand-new scar as the price of being one of the mostly white gang. But we also see hints of Bex before he was Bex. He visits his childhood bedroom a couple of times in the film, even staying there after his wife kicks him to the curb, and the walls are plastered with magazine clippings of football stars. There was an authentic love here once—obsessive or excessive, maybe, but still an actual fondness for and investment in something besides destruction and humiliation. This used to be real.
It’s all gone now. A match is an excuse for a fight; it’s an occasion to prowl. The closest we get to a sense that Bex still has a love of the game is that he kicks a ball around a little with his mates … and that leave him vulnerable to another onslaught from Yeti, so apparently, it’s not “safe” to love the game anymore. It’s getting in the way of his newer, more deeply felt hobby. His marriage is too. So are his friends, unless they fall in line.
But as Dean Martin tells you in these opening credits, that’s amore. Gary Oldman is terrific and unsettling here because he embodies that. This is a man in love with trouble.
The Firm is streaming on Kanopy.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
I am confused. What about the scene where there is inexplicably a truck with cotton bales at the cotton exchange? Where’s Gene Hackman?
I’ve said this before, but we really need to have a column called “No, Not That One.”
What did we watch?
Naked You Die!
A classic giallo. I mostly got in the spirit of this goofy-assed thing; the early parts and very ending lean into the corny stuff I deeply love, with a ridiculously pat solution that still made very little sense. The funny thing is that mystery, I think, sparks one’s intellectual curiosity rather than emotional stakes (one thing I did appreciate about Andor is that it stabs at the heart through clear dramatic propulsion), and there’s two ‘solutions’ to that. One, make the story absolutely, rigidly work according to logical principles (I’ve seen a few stories do this successfully). Two, which this story does, delve so hard into goofiness that any failures at verisimilitude are the appeal. I was deeply amused at the multiple points when characters appeared to simply accept their death.
Justified, Season Two, Episode Nine, “Brother’s Keeper”
Man, what an episode. Mags comes off as a haunting figure; on the one hand, brutally condemning the individuals of her community knowing the community as a whole will easily survive (an act which makes her singing afterwards look deeply absurd). On the other, her desperate – even pathetic – attempts to ‘take care’ of Loretta, where doubling up on sexual threats against her in a row (as well as having this immediately after Carol is nearly felt up) only emphasises what history Mags must have and what she’s not only trying ot prevent, but connect to – it’s hard to take this idea of a community seriously knowing sexual threats against young girls and women are such a fundamental part of it.
Although this ends up revealing something even bigger than gendered violence, in that it shows people at the top of a system acting upon personal psychologies – Carol is less weird than Mags but ultimately her conflict with her is based on dickswinging – while their hypercompetent number twos are operating on rational choice. By this, I refer to both Raylan and Boyd. Raylan has a moment where he describes the rest of his day after work – a bottle of Jim Beam, sleep, get up for work the next day – and I initially thought how sad that sounded until I remembered how his day job is so cool that I watch it for entertainment. Meanwhile, Boyd is moving very discreetly through the world in this episode, not drawing attention from anyone but quietly seizing money and power. He’s much more effective as this than he is as the loudmouth preacher he loves playing.
It’s interesting that a deeply American character like Mags also stands for everything America is against without being, like, a Communist – she intentionally chooses both individual and collective power – 4% of a presumably multinational company to maintain a town sounds pretty good – at the expense of the individuals currently in it. That is to say, a collective action. Justified is very much a story about cool and weird individuals (it’s basically a Western, after all) with each death being a horror on some level, as they’re chewed up by a larger system. More to come.
Biggest Laugh: Art shows up for maybe two lines, and neither of them are really jokes.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Claimed he could dance 57 steps nobody had ever seen before.” / “Why isn’t he here?” / “His wife shot him.”
Top Ownage: It’s a very close call between the folk horror of the climax and Raylan firmly telling Mags there’s no way she can see or talk to Loretta, with all the power of an institution behind him. Shades of the final episode of a certain cop show.
Such an incredible episode. The end with Mags and Loretta hits so hard, and Kaitlyn Dever does some of her best acting in this episode. Boyd pulling Ava into the dance is also one of my favorite moments of the show: this spontaneous expression of joy that’s tied into a fucked-up behind-the-scenes victory.
Watching Mags harden as she realises that Raylan will not budge, has no authority to budge, and would disagree with budging on both practical and moral grounds is incredible, up there with Vijjo Morgenstein letting Joey out in A History of Violence. Raylan is a pure expression of the Law as both institution and a moral force, and she’s just gonna get tougher in response. She’s so much more interesting than she needs to be.
Also thinking about how your favourite scene reflects the scene of Mags singing. Civilisation is a dirty affair.
Re: that last bit, Justified is an interesting successor to Deadwood for more than just the Olyphant factor. It actually might be more of a classical Western, in terms of its approach and interests.
Deadwood is more of an anti-Western like the TV show equivalent of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, more interested in a whole town and how it exists than how one guy will change it.
Yep. And about building civilization and community, rather than romanticizing their absence.
The Linguini Incident – From that sub-subgenre, “off kilter movies with Rosanna Arquette set in lower Manhattan before gentrification.” She’s an aspiring escape artist and Bess Houdini fangirl who works at a trendy (apparently Italian) restaurant. David Bowie is a bartender with a mysterious past. Both decide to rob the bar, and of course after a lot of tension they end up together. Though the film is as concerned with Rosanna’s friendship with Eszter Balint, who designs self-defense bras and does the actual robbery. We really do seem to have a lot of off kilter comedy set on the Lower East Side and environs, and remarkably, they all seem to work. This one is a bit a of a mess at time, but it’s quite engaging and endearing. Arquette is good, Bowie is great, and Buck Henry and Andre Gregory steal the show as the queer and flamboyant owners of the restaurant. Not the sequel to My Dinner with Andre I expected. (This is a director’s cuts made in recent years when Richard Shepard got the rights back to what he called an absolute mess. I am glad he restored it.)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Salvage” – I have thoughts. Not all of them kind. Tune in tomorrow.
Frasier, “Roz a Loan” – Frasier gives a struggling Roz a loan to hold her over till she finds work, and then obsesses when it seems she isn’t using the money wisely even though he told her no strings attached. Neither a bad episode or a good one, just a placeholder of sorts since KACL finally returns to its all talk format and brings everyone back. Firing and rehiring everyone seems like it was a waste of half a season.
That’s often something that happens in films and TV about people losing their jobs. They get them back after a while because it’s just meant to creat tension, not to actually rile the status quo. Steve Martin gets fired and then gets his job back in Parenthood. The governor loses the election (so all his staff lose their jobs) in Benson, then it turns out he won. There was another example I had in mind and forgot. So that makes three!
Anora – I seem to find myself in an accidental season of films about the perils of romance with Russians. This one was also good, although I get the feeling that much of it – especially the second act where everything starts going chaotically wrong – would have been a lot more entertaining seen with a crowd rather than watched alone at home. That kind of stressfully hilarious vibe just always hits harder with a bit of audience response, for me. Still, good movie – all the performances lived up to the hype but I think my favourite was Yura Borisov as Igor the melancholy, reluctant henchman.
Yeah, could imagine this not landing quite the same way, the point at which the Orthodox guy says “What the FUCK” when Anya is tied up got a huge, huge laugh in the theater. (Also horrified gasps at one character’s reply during a crucial point in the third act.) But yes on Borisov, what a wonderful, quietly expressive face.
The X-Files, “Fresh Bones” and “Colony”
“Fresh Bones” is another solid horror episode. It’s stomping all over some iffy territory, but it feels like its heart is in the right place; Wharton’s eventual fate is as narratively satisfying as it is terrifying. I’m not surprised that the writer also worked on Buffy and Angel, at least briefly, because the scare construction and build-up of horror momentum here are both really effective. It also has a strong sense of imagery, like the thorns wrapped around Scully’s steering wheel or what happens with the wound on her hand. I said this on Discord, but I’m also always going to appreciate any last-minute reveal that a character our leads have been interacting with actually died some time ago. Anyway, very classical horror story, for good and for ill.
Partway through “Colony,” I reflected that I’d heard of this episode, and so that must mean that it was a classic in X-Files circles, but so far, it had just been a normal level of engaging: compelling flash-forward opener (I often hate those, but this was okay), interesting premise, good guest acting, etc., but all pretty consistent with the show’s usual … oh, Samantha’s back. (If it’s really her.) Got it. It’s delightful how much this new development intensifies the episode and how Mulder having this information but not being able to reach Scully about it complicates both their emotional arc and the plot itself, since they both badly need to talk to each other about what’s going on with the shapeshifting Alien Bounty Hunter. It’s all the better because there’s minimal setup for it, beyond Mulder’s voiceover early on reminding us of Samantha’s abduction. Mulder just gets a mysterious call from his father, arrives to see what’s going on–some great Duchovny here, as Mulder goes through an awkward handshake with his dad and has trouble making eye contact with him–and BAM, a (possible) resolution to a lifelong quest and a huge new complication to his case and life. And even though this is definitely an SF episode, we get a superb horror ending, as Scully lets one Mulder into her motel room (where she’s been trying to hide out) only to get a call from another one.
It does feel like this episode should reference Mulder and Scully’s experiences in “Eve,” but whatever, this was great.
The Naked Gun – Could just list all the great bits and that’d function as my comment, but also a spoiler (Will say I agree with Lauren and “But Ronald trained Bill!” is such a great gag). I’ll note instead Liam Neeson and Anderson’s total dedication to taking this seriously, which makes it funny, Akiva Schaffer’s expertise at parodying the cop and “old guy punches people” genres, and that I could feel myself and the theater audience getting used to watching a dense, joke-filled comedy in theaters again. It’s a specific use of your brain where you need to really pay attention, otherwise you’ll miss a laugh, whereas the quips in Marvel and DC easily float by. There’s also the sheer primal bliss of 90 minutes of entertainment where your brain releases those sweet, sweet comedy chemicals. Ah, what we have missed without studio comedies in theaters.
Always Sunny, “The Gang Goes to The Dog Track” – Dark as hell even for the Gang, I might have not been in the best mood so I’ll probably rewatch it later. I also was mildly disappointed when one guest actor was NOT Stephen Dorff, and that’s obviously on me.
I heard multiple people on the way into The Naked Gun being appreciative of that 90-minute runtime. (Not counting me and my wife, though obviously we were two of the.) Studios, hear me: the people are starved for shorter movies! Not everything needs to be over two hours!
It’s not even a good business decision given that theaters can’t hold as many screenings of three hour movies, hell, I think that was an issue with the big-screen epics of the Fifties and Sixties.
I like this observation about paying attention – not in a immersive way, but as engaging with something trying to engage you (though the genius of this mode lies in its restraint, its willingness to let you blink and miss or not clock a deadpan gag). The movie rewards your attention and like you say, this creates good feelings.
My nephew really likes certain musical numbers and I’ve been talking with my sister about when he’ll be able to watch Looney Tunes, he’s two going on three so of course his brain can’t really engage with that kind of hectic comedy yet whereas he grasps Donald O’Connor jumping on the piano in “Make ‘Em Laugh” (and has been doing pseudo-pratfalls and goofy faces as a direct result, already realizing this will get him positive attention in and of itself).
Police Squad! Ep. 2: “Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment)” and Ep. 3: “Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood)”
PS comically deconstructs the standard noir plots, and the more imaginative, the better. “Ring of Fear” is sorta by the numbers in its treatment of the corruption in boxing plot, except for a rather funny scene in a steam room. But, as if to course correct, “Rendezvous” sets the mob protection plot in a key-making shop, which allows for some great puns (“Florida Keys”). And then there’s this all-time gag:
“Who are you, and how did you get in here?”
“I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith.”
Yeah, Joe Dante makes Ring’s atmosphere is a little too well-realized, it is funny but without the density of Rendezvous.
You’re not wrong, but I think “You’re not the man I married! *This* is the man I married!” is my favorite single-line joke in the whole series.
(Oh, no, actually it’s “Tell that bomber to take off,” but this is a close second.)
The locksmith joke is remembered as the all-timer and deservedly so, but rather than heap more praise on it, I also want to mention a couple of others that killed me.
The multiple “How do you explain this?” about the rock thrown through the store’s window leading to “Well, millions of years ago, the Earth’s crust was a molten mass…”
“It took me two weeks to find her apartment. Stella had neglected to give me her address.”
Final Destinations over the past week – three down, a few more to go
Bloodlines – Just in terms of knowing what it’s there to do, and doing it well, is this one of the best films I’ve seen this year? Can’t fault how much fun this was, and how much love and care went into the killing machines. And Tony Todd – so sad to see him like that, but what a lovely send off.
Final Destination – Death was so basic in the original compared to the elaborate mousetraps of Bloodlines. And I can’t get used to Ali Larter with that mousey brown hair. Great fun to kick off the series though.
Final Destination 2 – JJ from Criminal Minds is here, and for half of the post-incident follow-up deaths I feel like if she hadn’t tried to warn the victim of their impending doom, they would have escaped that particular moment. The death machine scenes are absolutely top notch, with so many misdirects built in for each one that I was actually surprised with how most of them happened in the end.
The roller coaster with Mary Elizabeth Winstead up next.
Glad I’m not the only person here who reflexively calls her JJ from Criminal Minds.
Bloodlines is so much fun. I know I don’t make it out to the theater that often, but I find it hard to believe that any number of new movies could push that spectacular opening group kill premonition sequence off a “best scenes of the year” list. And sad plus one on everything you said about Tony Todd.
And the capper of the opening premonition scene with that little shit of a kid! I can’t imagine what the cheers sounded like in the cinema.
Also, she will always be JJ to me (the dark bob was jarring, though).
I’ve seen online some indications that she might be involved in the next film – there’s one video of her mugging for the camera and hugging a log.
The conclusion of Avenue 5. I guess they thought they were getting a third season? At least they did not end on a cliffhanger.
The show’s conclusion follows the same pattern as the rest of it: some
solid jokes and solid performances by Hugh Laurie and Zach Woods undercut by slapdash plotting and a lack of realism to ground the zanier hijinks.
Also, they put out this show about a group of people stranded on a space ship slowly going insane (okay, they started insane and it gets worse) from cabin fever immediately before the covid closures happened. This is an all-time whiff. If the premiere had been 6 weeks later it would have been a huge hit and maybe had time to work out the kinks in the formula.
The basic plot problem here is that the central conceit is this space cruise ship is off course, they can’t get back on course, and it will take much longer than intended to get back on course. However, they keep doing things to change course. They have engines. It would be pretty easy I think to fix the grounded-ness problem. You could have them stuck in orbit of jupiter, for instance. You don’t have to make it hard sci fi, but the characters at least need to be grounded in their own reality.
The biggest commitment throughout the whole show is undercutting the premise of the joke.
. It’s a dark plot point but you can work with it. You can get humor out of the shirley jacksonian frenzy of the passengers and crew. Except of course they have no consistent logic for how they divide the passengers or who is likely to die. And in the end nothing happens.
“That’s visual effects. I work
in vfx. That’s stands for visual effects” is an incredible running joke though.
With another crack at this we
could have had a really great show about the madness of crowds. We could have had the sitcom equivalent of The Rhinoceros. (Rhinoceros being a great example of how grounding in reality lets you get wacky—it simply wouldn’t work if the rhinoceroses didn’t act like wild animals).
I watched The Firm a few nights ago, and your observations are spot on, in particular, the way that his being in “love with trouble” (cued by Dean Martin’s “that’s amore”) forces the other aspects of his life to fit in with this love, or they’ll be pushed aside.
The Firm (1989) is a powerful political horror film that reminds me of Seconds (1966) and Safe (1995). The last scene of The Firm, when the football hooligans turn on the camera crew, is its own mini-nightmare.
The way they start throwing bottles at the camera crew is such a great, personal eruption of antagonism.
Year of the Month update!
This August, we’ll be covering 1959. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Pillow Talk/Some Like It Hot
Aug. 8th: Gillian Nelson: Noah’s Ark
Aug. 15th: Gillian Nelson: I Captured the King of the Leprechauns
Aug. 18th: Sam Scott: Imitation of Life
Aug. 2oth: John Bruni: Shadows
Aug. 22nd: Gillian Nelson: Khrushchev Goes to Disneyland
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
Aug. 31st: Tristan J. Nankervis: North by Northwest
And in September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday
I will take Sleeping Beauty on the 27th or 28th.
Put me down for Sleeping Beauty on the 27th or 28th please.
Also, three of the “most collected” albums from 1959 on Discogs are Porgy & Bess editions from different artists! Wild.
Oh, this was supposed to be a reply to Sam.