TV Film

MR. MONK’S LAST CASE (2023)

February 6, 2024

Content Warning

This post discusses suicidal ideation.

Spoiler Warning

This post mentions several early plot points regarding MR. MONK’S LAST CASE. It also details the ending of Agatha Christie’s CURTAIN.

MONK was a USA network TV procedural featuring the very nuanced Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk. Monk is a brilliant, married San Francisco detective who struggles with obsessive–compulsive disorder.

In the opening episode Trudy, an accomplished journalist and Monk’s wife, is murdered via a car bomb and Monk finds himself confronting what he sees as an unsolvable case which flares his OCD to unsociable levels. He leaves the force and holes himself up in his apartment, fastidiously dusting and wiping and fussing over his living space, attempting to enact order, at least until SFPD comes knocking at his door and pull him back into the real world.

“It’s a jungle out there.

Disorder and confusion everywhere.”

MONK certainly falls in the realm of cozy, non-threatening murder mysteries. There is no omnipresent sense of dread and little in the way of heightened emotions. However, unlike many other cozy murder mysteries, the heart of the show is its melancholy. Adrian Monk is haunted by his wife’s death for years and burdened by his many compulsions and fears. Shalhoub never plays Monk overly serious or nihilistic but instead portrays him as a petulant man-youth with a bit of hurt behind his eyes.

“No one seems to care; well I do! Hey who’s in charge here?”

The series finale let Monk solve Trudy’s murder, allowing him to move on with his life, to live with answers instead of questions. At least, that was the goal.

14 Years Later…

From out of nowhere — and at no one’s request — we have MR. MONK’S LAST CASE. Monk is no longer a consultant for the SFPD. He’s been working on a memoir of his cases which is deemed uncommercial thanks to being overly verbose and concerned with anything but his cases. He’s off of — and stockpiling — his meds, flaring up his OCD.

I will not spoil anything about the case apart from stating that why it pulls a reluctant Monk back into detective mode is surprisingly cruel, especially for a show like MONK but, as it’s a full-blown made-for-TV film, stakes are expected to be raised, and MR. MONK’S LAST CASE certainly raises them.

If you noted the stockpiled pills and immediately thought: ‘Oh, Monk is contemplating suicide.’ then give yourself a pat on your back. There’s also a scene very early out of the gate where Monk longingly stares out of a high-rise window at the sidewalk below, and his fingers inch close to the window clasp. Also, he’s literally counting down the days on his paper calendar to a day with the name ‘Trudy’.

Solving Trudy’s murder didn’t bring Adrian the solace he had hoped for. Instead, coming out the other side he felt unmoored, unnecessary, a ship without a sail, and in his mind the only solution is to join Trudy in his idea of the afterlife. Dark? Sure. Too dark for MONK? Not at all as it feels organic to the character. Post-Trudy, Monk is a man who is never content, driven to placate himself but never finding peace.

“Poison in the very air we breathe.

Do you know what’s in the water we drink? Well, I do and it’s amazing.”

While Adrian Monk certainly shares DNA with a number of other murder mystery/detective fiction protagonists — MR. MONK’S LAST CASE has a number of blatant riffs, especially a very not-so-subtle insertion of an adoptable dog named ‘Watson’ — he mirrors Agatha Christie’s fastidious and fussy Belgian ex-policeman-turned-private-detective Poirot more than others.

Putting aside recent adaptations of Poirot mysteries, Hercules Poirot is an overly neat and tidy man, a man who is very proud of his perfectly coiffed mustache, of his immaculately shined shoes, of the fabric that lines his coat. Like Monk, Poirot becomes very agitated when anything disrupts his sense of order, be it mussing his attire or imperfectly sized eggs.

Also, like Monk, Poirot has an bit of an ego, is very aware of his talents and — as he himself puts it — his ‘little grey cells’, and is steadfastly stuck in his own ways. However, Monk and Poirot couldn’t differ more about their deduction techniques:

Monk’s technique is in the Holmes-ian mould in that he pieces together the murders utilizing precision knowledge of items and dates and scuffs and cigarette ash which inevitably result in comedic moments where Monk is disgusted by having to get down and dirty and then he throws a childish fit.

Nonetheless, Poirot is in every which way a Christie protagonist. While she was a relentless researcher and certainly knew of many ways to physically enable someone to kill someone, she was always more interested in the circumstances, the emotions and motivations and flawed humanity that drove one to commit such an act. While, yes, Poirot does ask suspects to detail their time and place around the murder, it’s not just the time and place he’s making note of, but the words and body language in-between those bullet points.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s frustration with how wildly popular his Sherlock Holmes creation had become, after having published far more Poirot novels than she thought she ever would she found herself tiring of the character. However, like Doyle, she came to the realization that for as long as she lived, Poirot would live alongside her.

To cope with this, she did the next best thing. In the midst of WWII she penned Poirot’s final novel, CURTAIN: POIROT’S LAST CASE. While it starts like so many other Poirot novels — countryside inn, an ensemble of suspects, unexplained deaths — the circumstances are different this time around. Poirot and his affable sidekick Hastings are older. Times are changing. The world is different. The old guard is ailing, reduced to a number of medications to keep the heart beating. Tried-and-true techniques no longer guarantee the same results.

Part of Christie’s impetus was to ensure readers would receive proper closure regarding Poirot’s life and contributions, as it was also written with bombs falling around her and she was very unsure about the future.

Upon completion of CURTAIN, Christie locked the manuscript in a bank vault and continued to pen Poirot adventures, the last of which was ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER, published in 1972.

After penning the Tommy and Tuppence mystery POSTERN OF FATE in 1973, Christie knew that would be her last work so she unfurled CURTAIN and it was published in September of 1975. She lived to see the world react to Poirot’s literal end, but passed shortly after on January 12th, 1976.

It’s on record that Christie was a rather secretive person. Her ‘lost 11 days’ where she just up and vanished from her home and family, leaving behind numerous oddities that were construed as ‘clues’, including three envelopes handed out to staff only to be opened upon her death has the grist of a private joke. She was later found residing at a spa and she claimed to have no memory of the past 11 days.

What occurred between those 11 days, as well as the reasoning for leaving in the first place, has been the source of endless speculation, including several films and a Doctor Who episode.

“People think I’m crazy, ‘cause I worry all the time.

If you paid attention you’d be worried too.”

A brief aside: It’s been widely speculated that Christie was suffering from Alzeimers late in life. If you read her novels as they were published you can see her prose turn, leaning more into terse bouts of dialogue, characters often repeating or even contradicting themselves in non-writerly ways. Certain narrative twists don’t land or even make much sense. Hell, even the title of her last Poirot novel — ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER — seems to underscore that she was aware of her ailments.

The upside of this is that CURTAIN, a novel Christie wrote thirty years prior, a novel so rich and complex, a novel that reckons with one’s worth and ability and aging and expectations, reads thirty years later like nothing she has published in decades, but also reads like everything she’s wanted to put into words for so, so very long.

(I swear this is Eddie Campbell’s work! I wish I would have asked him when I met him!)

CURTAIN closes with Poirot murdering his suspect, despite the fact that he has no tangible evidence to link him to the five murders he’s investigating. Then, before bed, Poirot intentionally neglects his heart pills and he passes away in his sleep due to a heart attack. He dies torn between his actions to dole out justice, but also with the knowledge that he has enacted justice but can no longer be trusted to do so. He is tired; so tired.

He pens all of this to his sidekick Hastings, who receives Poirot’s scribed ‘drawing room speech’ several months after Poirot has been buried. Envelopes beget envelopes.

“And last of all, the pistol shot. My one weakness. I should, I am aware, have shot him through the temple. I could not bring myself to produce an effect so lopsided, so haphazard. No, I shot him symmetrically, in the exact center of the forehead…”

Poirot, CURTAIN, in a letter he penned for Hastings. [pg. 222]

MR. MONK’S LAST CASE leans heavily on all of the above, from the formal queasiness of asymmetry to feeling adrift from modern society, seeing one’s self as abnormal, the desire to kill one’s self to quell the madness around you, to be the sole person who can instill order no matter the cost, to hope for some kind of peace and solace that you’ve known in the past, to put a name and a date on it, to send envelopes containing words hedging around what all of this means, why one needed to see this through to the very bitter end…

“You better pay attention or else this world we love so much might just kill you.

(I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so!)”

I can’t say for sure that MR. MONK’S LAST CASE used Christie’s CURTAIN as an influence, a template, and — or — a springboard, but the pieces fit in a way that suits both protagonists, as well as for the viewers who are mystery nerds.

Despite having penned hundreds of words above about how MONK pays tribute to the detective fiction of the past, the show itself never calls attention to it or makes it the centerpiece of a scene. In other words, you don’t have to have read every Christie mystery or every Hammett potboiler in order to enjoy MONK. It’s a series that stands on its own two legs, while also acknowledging works that have inspired those willing the show into existence.

I should know. I started watching MONK a few seasons into its run and was smitten, despite having never glommed onto detective fiction in the past. I had barely read any of Doyle’s Sherlock tales, the only Christie works I saw were adaptations aired on MASTERPIECE THEATRE, which I mostly watched for the Edward Gorey animated opening sequence. I was into noir, but mostly for the moral ambiguity and the misfit characters and the grime and nihilism.

“‘Cause there’s a jungle out there.

It’s a jungle out there.”

Was MONK cozy? Sure. However, that general sense of melancholy, of feeling like you were a burr on society but also that society was a personal burr for you resonated deeply. Monk, the character, the persona, was one of a damaged individual just trying to get by. While he thought highly of himself, the world around him literally suffocated him. It may sound like a minor character tweak, but for the time — hell, even now — it’s far headier than the usual ‘oh I’m just a drunk with mommy/daddy issues but I’m also brilliant’.

MR. MONK’S LAST CASE is not just a shadow of CURTAIN. After all, this is a proper film — albeit made-for-streaming and all of the baggage that entails — and fills up two hours (with commercial breaks, naturally). Every facet of the show is dialed up to 11, including explosions, manner of deaths, almost all of the gang is back together and hell, even the number of exterior shots instead of bland offices and over-utilized Warner Bros. lot buildings have increased! They’re playing with a far larger budget than pretty much any TV-centric detective fiction fan is familiar with.

Also, simply because of Adrian’s germaphobic nature, the show handles COVID and the collective lockdown and repercussions far better than just about any other mainstream media work I can think of. Fittingly, the populace’s embrace of safety and awareness of infectious issues only serves to depress Monk further.

MR. MONK’S LAST CASE looks great: it no longer has its odd vaseline-ish patina, drones have been deployed, and the editing pushes and pulls where and when it should. The suspect? Well, let’s just say I wish the real-life counterpart faced the same sort of justice.

MONK was a certain type of show that is sadly going extinct; a crowd-pleaser of a collective effort that knew how to entertain, but also indulged itself in substantial and thoughtful riffs. It was show the whole family could watch, but each member would delight in vastly different facets of an episode.

MR. MONK’S LAST CASE manages to return to that form, to toe that line: it’s funny, it’s quippy, it’s smart, it pays homage to the past, it has a lot of spectacle, it explores the interiority of its namesake, it has a great villain, it’s not copaganda — I could go on and on.

Yes, MR. MONK’S LAST CASE is more open-ended than CURTAIN. However, I do hope it is how we leave him: in a better state than when we first met him.

“Eh bien.”

Hercule Poirot

“It’s a gift… and a curse.”

Adrian Monk

Addendum

Yes, I know. MONK has so many quotable moments, so why, why?! did I choose to only quote the Randy Newman song that serves as the title sequence, and wasn’t even part of MONK’s first season? ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’ is that succinct and, despite the fact that it was a song that pre-dates MONK, it perfectly encapsulates the show. That’s why. Best of luck getting that earworm outta your head now!

Regarding Turner Classic Movies

December 11, 2023

I’m taking a rare moment to not offer a suggestion, not offer a recommendation, but to grouse.

I’ve been watching the cable channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM, as it’s more colloquially known as) for decades. For those with modern cable packages, it may shock you to learn that when I first moved to Chicago as a older teen, it was included in the most basic cable package I could afford. I’d constantly watch it, and still do. It is on practically 24/7 in our household. I attended one of the handful of TCM nationwide screening events — it featured an in-person one-on-one interview with original TCM host Robert Osborne (R.I.P) and Jane Powell (R.I.P.). I’ve glowed while attending the TCM Fest in Los Angeles. I’d been attending Noir City film events hosted by Eddie Muller for years before he was brought in to program Noir Alley. I have so many TCM enamel pins. (So many!)

TCM has always been a cultural staple for me, letting me revisit beloved films as well as giving context and informing me as to works I overlooked in the past.

To say TCM has undergone a transformation recently would be an understatement.

(I will note: there are a lot of old-school TCM viewers who constantly complain whenever anything newer than from the 1950s is played. I am not one of them. Classics are classics, no matter the time period. The 90s were thirty years ago, and those films deserve the same recognition as anything from the 30s. Also? TCM still mostly plays films from the 30s-60s. Anything later — or even earlier! — is rare.)

Several years ago, they went under a significant redesign, one that was meant to modernize the network and the brand. It no longer has a cozy patina but instead all of the bumpers are all high-contrast, black backgrounds and neon-icons, laid upon overly exuberant 30-second musical quips. Given that TCM has a surprisingly high number of youthful viewers, that’s not surprising and, while I found it slightly too bright and boisterous, it was immaculately designed and I had no problem rolling with it.

Within the past year, however, I’ve found the channel to be lackluster. While, yes, TCM traffics in replaying old-favorites, they’ve taken to replaying them within a few days of each other which is tiresome and antithetical to the brand. Warner Bros. killed off TCM Underground, the 15+ year-old cult block that ran late-night on Fridays, programmed by the brilliant Millie De Chirico. Cult films are what drive film as a medium forward and youths need an informed voice to learn from. Warner Bros. fired practically everyone who made TCM into the singular filmic channel that people love. (Thanks to folks like Spielberg and Scorsese, they did re-hire a few of the higher-ups, but certainly not enough.)

I’ll also note that I am still very upset at how they treated their first woman host, Tiffany Vasquez, who was removed from TCM relatively quickly. Was she a bit awkward out of the gate? Sure, but who wouldn’t be?! She had an energy and verve and I firmly believe she would have been a great host if she were given some time to settle into the role.

While I do have issues with how they’ve treated their hosts, I do want to extoll the current hosts:

Ben Mankiewicz is so winsome and gregarious but also very generous.

Dave Karger is the musical/theatre nerd you want in your corner.

Alicia Malone is perhaps the least visually static host in televisual history — she changes looks and hair colors every few weeks — and I love that as well as her insight.

Eddie Muller, well, I already talked about him but I will note that I have met him. He loves to talk just as much as he does on Noir Alley and for as many words as he spills in Noir Alley segments? I know he has at least three times more he’s champing at the bit to spit out.

Last, but definitely not least, motherfucking Chicago’s own Jacqueline Stewart, doing the work to call everyone’s attention to silent films and under-appreciated Black cinema.

I also love a lot of the production design and cinematography updates of the intro/outro segments! Granted, a few of them — specifically the very robotic camera movements for intros/extros — were clearly done because of the pandemic, however they were much needed. The prior efforts had the sheen of 90s video.

However, the channel has become noisier, glossier, and has lost most of its idiosyncrasy. It feels more like AMC in the days before MAD MEN and THE WALKING DEAD, like they’re just tossing on whatever they have available without any sense of theme or engagement. The highly stylized and tautly edited commercials advertising the monthly features that were unlike anything else on TV are no longer. My wife and I would routinely dissect those montages, and I’d break down each featured film for her because I have that vocabulary. That doesn’t happen now.

I realize that brands need to keep up with the times, but TCM was a stalwart. It was reliable and cozy. It wasn’t just a cable channel; it was more like a televisual friend that you could always depend on. That’s no longer the case.

I’ll note that the cheap TCM subscription I had many, many moons ago no longer exists. Comcast/Xfinity realized pretty swiftly that TCM subscribers will do anything to keep their channel, and they had the audacity to move it to the most expensive package, their upper-tier sports package — which is fucking ridiculous because TCM viewers? Not known for loving sports! But they’ll force film fans to subsidize the outrageous prices to broadcast sports! — and, unlike other cable channels, you cannot pay for it à la carte. (I will note: some TCM offerings are available via Max and the streaming Criterion Channel.)

For the first time ever, I’m thinking of ditching TCM. Because I’m a big film nerd, I own a lot of what they already play, but I love playing a personal game where I walk through the living room and glance at the TV and try to guess the film playing. (I’m pretty good at that game, if I do say so myself!) However, nowadays, TCM just makes me long for the days of old, which is depressing, even if it makes me sound like a curmudgeon.

It’s disheartening. As you can clearly read, I’ve loved TCM, but it’s become a shadow of itself, as so much of everything around me nowadays. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years? When you feel that tug where you’re being taken advantage of, when you aren’t quite getting what you want out of an exchange? Fucking move on and don’t look back.

I just never expected I’d have to do that with TCM.

Angelo Badalamenti (1937-2022)

December 14, 2022

If the works of David Lynch have taught us anything, it’s that those who have passed will live long in our memories and, sadly, composer Angelo Badalamenti will now only exist in that realm.

I’ve thought and mused a lot about TWIN PEAKS over the past few years, for reasons anyone can probably suss out, but I feel like I failed to give due attention to how much work Badalamenti does to buoy Lynch. Yes, there’s Laura Palmer’s iconic theme, and of course Audrey’s dance, but I find his score for FIRE WALK WITH ME to be far more resonant and brutal, The Pink Room (NSFW) in particular.

His influence cannot be overstated. He provided an enlightened soundtrack for scores of dreamy and broken and fucked-up individuals, and he will be missed.

COLUMBO: The Most Crucial Game (1972, S02E03)

November 9, 2021

(peacock/tubi/VOD) Gutted to hear that the world has lost Dean Stockwell. While he was in two COLUMBO episodes, my favorite of his is THE MOST CRUCIAL GAME. Dean Stockwell plays Eric Wagner, a hedonistic playboy who owns a Los Angeles football team who is murdered by the team’s manager Paul Hanlon (classic COLUMBO villain Robert Culp).

For the roughly ten minutes Stockwell is on-screen, he’s hilariously languid, lazy, high and hungover, and it’s the highlight of the episode — which is saying a lot considering how brilliant the interplay between Culp and Peter Falk always is. It’s not quite what I’d label as a classic episode of COLUMBO, but it’s an extremely enjoyable 75 minutes and, thanks to director Jeremy Kagan — perhaps best known for helming THE CHOSEN (1981) — features some of the surprisingly experimental camerawork and editing that the early COLUMBO eps are known for. You’ll be missed, Dean.

COLUMBO – Lovely but Lethal (1973, S03E01)

November 4, 2021

This was initially penned for a collection of fan essays meant to cover the entire COLUMBO series, but the collection was never realized.

Viveca Scott is not like other murderesses in Columbo. She’s not an actress. She’s not married, she’s not a scorned lover, she’s not even insecure. She’s the head of Beauty Mark, a cosmetics company so popular that even our dear detective is familiar with her face.

Despite its popularity, Beauty Mark’s stock has been fading. Viveca (Vera Miles) needs a hit, as her gloating competitor David Lang (Vincent Price) reminds her. However, Viveca has an ace up her sleeve with the brilliant-but-boozy Dr. Murcheson, a chemist skilled enough to manufacture the cosmetics holy grail: a cream that eradicates the appearance of age, aptly named Miracle.

Sadly, Murcheson’s alcoholism is a roadblock in getting Miracle to market. In the nightmarish opening, we see his sweaty, porous face splashed with red light, looking the very sight of a mad doctor as he runs some final tests on a female subject. Murcheson’s assistant chemist, Karl Lessing (Martin Sheen), simply observes until Murcheson’s tremors nick the woman’s face. Karl takes over, leaving Murcheson to find comfort in a whiskey bottle.

Murcheson evaluates the test results and tells Viveca that Miracle is a failure, the prior, very successful results a fluke, but she hears quite different news from her spy at Lang’s: mousy, loose-lipped assistant Shirley Blaine. Shirley informs Viveca that Lang just received the most ingenious cream and, in one of the more far-fetched Columbo scenes, Shirley applies the cream to a nearby maid’s face and her crow’s feet disappear!

It dawns on Viveca that Karl, Murcheson’s assistant, falsified Miracle’s latest tests and brought the cream to Lang. Instead of informing Murcheson or buying the cream from Shirley, Viveca opts to unsuccessfully bargain with Karl for Miracle’s formula. When he laughs at her escalating offers, Viveca does what few Columbo murderers do: in the heat of the moment she impetuously kills Karl, bludgeoning him with a nearby microscope. She takes Karl’s single jar of Miracle and leaves before his body cools.

Early the next morning, Columbo investigates the scene of the crime (showing more interest in finding salt for his hard-boiled egg than clues), then makes a beeline for Viveca, following her from Karl’s dartboard to Beauty Mark’s offices, then to Viveca’s ‘Fat Farm’, peppering her with questions the entire way. Upon inquiring about her history with Karl, she responds: “I like young men, Lieutenant, lots of them. And if that shocks your ancient masculine double standard, I’m sorry.” In retaliation, Viveca drags Columbo to a nude exercise group, leaving the Lieutenant flustered and eager to exit and question Murcheson.

With one irritant out of her way, Viveca goes to dispatch another. Shirley has realized that Viveca was behind Karl’s murder, and the poor girl (who just wants to be like Viveca) tries to leverage that knowledge for a Beauty Mark executive position. Instead of granting her wish, Viveca opts to murder again (another Columbo abnormality) by gifting her poisoned cigarettes. Shirley dies while smoking and driving, looking to the world as if she lost control of her car.

Unfortunately, Shirley’s death does little to prevent Columbo from piecing together the murder. He confronts Viveca and she’s taken away, an unceremonious end for a most unusual Columbo woman. Viveca was a wily, successful, independent, occasionally shortsighted woman, sadly all too capable of murder. She was an anomalous antagonist when compared to Columbo’s other killer women, co-dependents who murdered out of jealousy, revenge, or ‘easy’ money. Viveca Scott was a murderess the likes of which Columbo had never seen before, and would never see again.

BATES MOTEL (1987)

March 5, 2021

(DVD) This isn’t the recently completed BATES MOTEL TV series, but a made-for-TV film that was shot in-between PSYCHO III and PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING (which was actually shot after BATES MOTEL).

This isn’t a great film but an interesting curio. (Granted, one could say that about -all- of the sequels.) It’s worth noting that Anthony Perkins doesn’t appear in it; instead, Kurt Paul — Perkins’ stunt double in the prior Psycho films — portrays him. BATES MOTEL takes place after PSYCHO (ignoring PSYCHO II and III) and features Alex West (Bud Cort) who killed his step-father as a youth and was then thrown into the same asylum as Norman Bates. Bates befriended Alex and, upon dying, bequeathed him his hotel. Alex, along with the assistance of Willie (Lori Petty) a plucky young woman, fix up the hotel while fending off fears that the place is haunted by Mrs. Bates.

Meanwhile — and slightly jarringly inserted — a woman (Kerrie Keane) checks into the hotel, as — feeling old, alone and unloved after a recent divorce — plans on killing herself. As she’s about to do so, she’s is interrupted by a teen girl (Khrystyne Haje) who invites her to an after-prom party where she woos a young Jason Bateman and realizes there’s still some life in her bones after all. Then — hardly a spoiler, as it’s telegraphed from the get-go but letting you know just in case — it’s revealed that the teen killed herself in the very same room years ago.

If you read the above and thought: ‘Hey, that sounds like a story I’d see in a 80s TV anthology!’ you can pat yourself on the back. BATES MOTEL was a feature film masquerading as a TV pilot, where each week would tell the dovetailing tales of troubled hotel guests. While BATES MOTEL takes far too much time getting the hotel in Alex’s hands — including a lot of padding involving him simply trying to locate the hotel — and it is far too enamored with the Scooby Doo-ish pratfalls that occur afterwards, the B-story is satisfying enough that I wish they’d moved forward with the show. Obviously, they didn’t and we only have this TV film to show for it.

(Then again, I also unabashed love the TV anthology series FRIDAY THE 13: THE SERIES, which similarly has little to do with its namesake.)