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!

PROJECT A-KO (1986)

April 12, 2022

(Blu-Ray/Roku/tubi) As one might suspect, I was a gigantic nerd in my youth, enough of one that I was part of a group in high-school that would pool our lunch money to order LaserDiscs of late 80s anime and we’d then, err, find ways to ‘happen upon’ ways to duplicate copies for all involved. Let me tell you: bootlegging works were far more difficult, but far more enthralling, back then.

Apart from the soundtrack occasionally popping up in my playlists over the years, I’d mostly forgotten about PROJECT A-KO (despite still having a proper VHS copy of it)! At least, until this post popped up in my feeds.

The immediate flashback this post induced was: “oh, now that I think about it, this anime wasn’t just fan-service, it was super gay.” And, yup:

“The basic plot of PROJECT A-KO is: one dumbass lesbian fighting another dumbass lesbian to win the heart of the dumbest lesbian in the lands.”

I forgot how funny, how comic, PROJECT A-KO was, even though I know I didn’t get the bulk of the in-jokes and parodies and references back-in-the-day, and probably still don’t. However, it features a ton of hilariously universal kinetic physical comedic moments, while still often feeling grounded despite, you know, someone using numerous missiles as stepping stones during combat. Additionally, while the characters do a lot of punching, there’s not much in the way of punching down. Everyone here is flawed and messy and definitely either queer or over-protective found family, and you’re meant to identify with their flaws, rather than scorn them.

I rarely recommend any YouTube film-centric commentary video that runs for over an hour because I often don’t have the patience for watching them, but I highly recommend the one linked in the MeFi post above. I learned a lot, and it brought back a lot of memories.

Lastly, the OST is well-worth your time. Spaceship in the Dark is still a banger with all of its orchestral hits.

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003)

July 1, 2021

(DVD/Blu-Ray) Back in May I posted about MUBI teaming up with the Music Box Theatre — a Chicago arthouse theater — for a two week ‘Back on the Big Screen’ event. (The previously recommended MATINEE was also part of the programming.) The sole film I didn’t recognize was Ming-liang Tsai’s GOODBYE, DRAGON INN, so I immediately bought a ticket without reading anything about it, apart from a sentence fragment I accidentally skimmed while patching up my Music Box Chrome extension: “It’s the final show at Taipei’s enormous Fu Ho movie palace”

The screening was surprisingly well-populated for a Monday matinee in early June — a good sixty, seventy or so folks, all vaguely socially distanced and mostly masked. Maybe more? I’m poor at eyeballing an audience but, given that two weeks prior, I was the sole person at a Wednesday matinee, it was a solid crowd.

That said, based on what I overheard upon exiting the film, a good two-thirds of them walked away feeling disappointed, expecting something far more gripping or narratively substantial than they received. Obviously, I don’t hold the same opinion.

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN is first and foremost a mood piece. Apart from the film that plays throughout the bulk of the piece (DRAGON INN, 1967), there’s very little dialogue in the film. A young man enters a film palace screening its final film before closing. A black cat scampers down the hallway. A woman with leg braces clomps around, doing her last daily rounds, stepping across leaky spots in the deteriorating building. She brings food up to the projectionist, who is missing from the projection booth. Said young man encounters a small number of individuals during the screening, some who may be real or may be ghosts. One particularly memorable individual is a woman who loses her shoe while endlessly cracking enough sunflower seeds to flood the theater stairway. The young man leaves. The woman closes up shop. The projectionist leaves. The woman follows.

In other words, GOODBYE, DRAGON INN is comprised of atmospheric vignettes of theatergoers and theater operators. It has the barest of narrative arcs, and few specifics about the characters that inhabit the theater, and even those specifics are inferred instead of explicitly stated. It’s pure cinema in that it shows, it doesn’t tell, which is obviously why it was brilliantly part of MUBI’s programming. While it’s not to everyone’s taste — after the film, I grabbed a drink outside at a local bar and couldn’t help but hear two folks bitch and moan about how boring the movie was — this sort of visual longform work is catnip to me, and I feel very lucky to have been able to attend the screening, and very thankful that MUBI did program it instead of a film that may have been more popular, but certainly would have been far less interesting.

(This is yet another case where the film is not available to stream, and hunting down a copy for a region one player can be costly and very difficult, so I’ll wink and suggest a YouTube search instead.)

ELECTRIC DREAMS (1984)

June 24, 2021

(DVD/BR/YT) ELECTRIC DREAMS is an odd high-concept romantic rivalry/surveillance thriller about architect Miles (Lenny von Dohlen, best known as the agoraphobic florist from TWIN PEAKS), his computer, cellist Madeline (Virginia Madsen), and the love triangle they inhabit, one with shades of CYRANO DE BERGERAC.

Given that I was both a computer nerd and practicing cellist as a youth, I’ve seen this film more than a few times over the years. Yes, its portrayal for what a mid-1980s computer was capable of doing was wildly overblown, but it had a fantastic soundtrack — as you would expect as it’s courtesy of Giorgio Moroder — and was extraordinarily shot. It has a number of lush scenes that highlight the difference between video and film, as well as a more than a few fantastically composed visual vignettes, and Madsen is absolutely charming as Madeline. It certainly was one of the first narrative films that ‘spoke’ to me, that made me feel seen, given that it was both about computers and a cellist.

The film features a musical number where Madeline warms up by playing Bach’s Minuet in G Major (what the ELECTRIC DREAMS soundtrack dubs as the ‘Mad Minuet’), which was one of my warm-ups when I was a young cellist so I can’t help but love it, but I also adore how long and -fun- the scene is. I was never a brilliant cellist — although I was good enough to be in a quartet to play for then-Vermont governor Howard Dean — but when I got on a roll, when I was in the zone, it felt just as exuberant and gleeful. You can view the number below:

ELECTRIC DREAMS has been unavailable in the U.S. for some time now, but there was a recent UK Blu-Ray release via Second Sight. There’s also a copy floating around YouTube that I may have already ‘accidentally’ linked to. (Shh, don’t tell!)

“Hm. Very smart, but weird.”

P.S. There’s a great post-mortem about the film available on YouTube. And, for what it’s worth, there are two scenes I remember vividly from watching it as a youth: the motherboard being washed out, and Madeline’s cello being crushed in the elevator. Madsen’s method time was worth it.

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975)

May 5, 2021

(Arrow/VOD/Blu-Ray) ‘Girl gang’ exploitation films are a big blind spot for me, one I’ve been trying to rectify for a while now. While I dearly love the SWITCHBLADE SISTERS podcast (RIP), I knew absolutely nothing about the film going in apart from the fact that Tarantino featured it in his short-lived Rolling Thunder VHS series. I assumed it was a bit of an insensitive gender swap on male gang films of the early 60s, and, boy, was I wrong, because this film is gonzo.

While it does have several unfortunate exploitation hallmarks — easy nudity and a rape scene — ultimately director Jack Hill (SPIDER-BABY, FOXY BROWN) does these girls right by portraying them as hardened, take-no-shit folks, literally constantly circled by the patriarchy, willing to wage a fucking war when the time comes, and oh yeah, they rain holy hell down in the third act.

This is a film that’d be celebrated for its vibrant anger if it were made today. So many thinkpieces would be penned about how Lace talks through her teeth!

Arrow recently released a pristine Blu-Ray, which I highly recommend. However, while I love the cover art, I can’t help but point out that the rendition of Patch has her eyepatch on the wrong eye and it’s irked me ever since I noticed the discrepancy, even though it has to be intentional but I can’t imagine why. That said, Arrow thoughtfully included the original artwork as a reversible cover!

Arrow’s trailer:

Original trailer (NSFW):

SMOOTH TALK (1985)

March 1, 2021

(Criterion/DVD/BR) Unfortunately it’s currently not available to stream, but Criterion recently released a newly restored edition of SMOOTH TALK, a very dark coming-of-age tale from documentarian/director Joyce Chopra based on Joyce Carol Oates’ short story WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? It’s vintage 80s, very sun-kissed, featuring Laura Dern in one of first roles, plenty of mall shopping, bangles, and teen girl sexuality.

It’s also worth noting that the new Criterion release also contains a copy of Oates’ short, well-worth reading after watching the film, if you haven’t read it already. (Or you can read it here.) I simply love it when Criterion does this sort of thing. For instance, my Criterion copy of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK has a bundled copy of the source material.

THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

February 23, 2021

(Blu-Ray) (A quick caveat: skip over any public domain copies of this film.)

THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM is notable for several reasons: Michael Curtiz (GONE WITH THE WIND) directed it; it features Fay Wray’s scream just a bit before she’d appear in KING KONG; it was one of the rare Warner Bros. horror films of the 30s (including DOCTOR X, which Curtiz also directed, and also starred Wray); it influenced a number of films (obviously it was remade into HOUSE OF WAX, but I speculate it also trickled down to DARKMAN); it was also the last Technicolor two-color process film, and it looks -gorgeous-.

What’s interesting about color and film is that, while we have THE JAZZ SINGER as (unfortunately) the bellringer for talkies, films have been projected in color practically since their inception, either through reel-tinting or even hand-tinting, or early Technicolor processes.* THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM’s use of the two-color Technicolor process** is an astounding marvel, leaning into the gauzy, muted nature of the development procedure, utilizing it to create a far more expressionistic film that it’d be without color. The closing scene in the basement is especially striking, not just because of the set design and acute angles, but the use of light and shadow and command of tint.

Again, there are a lot of reasons to watch this — it’s a fun popcorn film, Wray is fantastic in it, although she’s supporting character and not the lead, and Glenda Farrell makes a meal out of her screwball crime reporter character — but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you watch an older or public domain print. It was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation in 2019, then released commercially in 2020, and that’s what you want to see.***

“Images of wax that throbbed with human passion! Almost woman! What did they lack?!”

David Bordwell’s academic film blog has a terrific recent guest post about the history of color processes in Hollywood

** For more on early Technicolor processes, which are all distinctly fascinating, check out: http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor3.htm

*** See https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archive-blog/2020/04/21/mystery-wax-museum-restored-qa-scott-macqueen for more information on the restoration process. Also, here’s a before/after video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVrriovENz0

THIS IS CINERAMA (1952)

February 2, 2021

(kanopy/Apple TV/Blu-Ray) Cinerama was a widescreen shooting and projection process that, at its time, was the closest you could get to a wholly immersive filmgoing experience. The way it worked was primitive and troublesome, as it not only shot three negatives at the same time (similar to early Technicolor films), but it did so through three cameras, positioned so the footage could be (mostly) seamlessly projected by three projectors.

The end result is spectacularly overwhelming. While the primary allure is the all-encompassing visuals, you’re also bombarded by seven-channel directional surround sound. It truly is a unique experience when it works, but projecting films like this is a hairy process, one that requires constant monitoring for -each- projector. (You can read more about the projection process here.)

If memory serves, the process broke down and had to be re-synced when I saw THIS IS CINERAMA at Los Angeles’ Cinerama theater during TCM Fest, a time when you have your top projectionists on the job. (The LA Cinerama is one of the few existing Cinerama theaters; the other two are in Seattle and Bradford, England.)

Cinerama as a shooting process didn’t last long, thanks to the unwieldy cameras and the introduction of single-strip widescreen lenses like the Ultra Panavision 70, but the theaters survived as many widescreen spectacles were converted to their three-strip projection setup, not unlike how many 35mm films are blown up for IMAX screens.

“So,” you might ask, “if it’s about the experience of being in a high-end theater, why should I watch this on my laptop? Also, isn’t the film mostly a travelogue with some choreographed water skiing?” Well, yes, you certainly aren’t watching for the story. However, while the current restoration allows you to watch it like any widescreen film, it also allows you to view it in the shape you’d see it in at the theater. In a time when we can’t — or at least shouldn’t — be attending theaters, it’s a similarly unique home viewing experience.

ALL THAT JAZZ (1979)

September 8, 2020

(DVD/BR) While I appreciate Bob Fosse as a talented choreographer and director, I don’t think much of the man himself, which is what conflicts me about this self-indulgent paean from himself, about himself, to himself. On one hand, the self-glorification of his caddish behavior — even if he hangs a lampshade on it — is pretty despicable and, even more criminal, it’s often dull. On the other hand, the closing scene is a goddamn stunner, and may make the film worth your moral price of admission.

Closing scene (NSFW):

Trailer: