Los Angeles Times - 06.04.2020

E6 MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2020 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR

During the coronavirus crisis, the Los Angeles Times is making some temporary changes to our print sections. The prime- time TV grid is on hiatus; highlighted listings will continue. SERIES

The Neighborhood(N) 8 p.m. CBS The VoiceThe battle rounds conclude. (N) 8 p.m. NBC Whose Line Is It Anyway? (N) 8 p.m. CW Bob Hearts AbisholaBob’s (Billy Gardell) ex-wife (Nic- ole Sullivan) tries to get back in his life. 8:30 p.m. CBS All Rise(N) 9 p.m. CBS Roswell, New Mexico(N) 9 p.m. CW Better Call Saul(N) 9 p.m. AMC The Plot Against America Evelyn and Rabbi Bengels- dorf (Winona Ryder, John Turturro) receive an invita- tion from Mrs. Lindbergh (Caroline Kaplan) to a state dinner for Nazi Germany’s foreign minister in this new episode. 9 p.m. HBO ManifestMichaela and Ben (Melissa Roxburgh, Josh Dallas) put everything on the line to attempt a dangerous rescue in the season finale of the mystery series. 10 p.m. NBC Breeders(N) 10 p.m. FX Dispatches From Else- where(N) 10:15 p.m. AMC

CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus Pandemic(N) 10 and 11 a.m. CNN Coronavirus Update(N) Noon and 7 p.m. CW Pandemic: What You Need to Know(N) Noon ABC Coronavirus Crisis(N) 7 p.m. Fox

SPECIALS Who Wants to Be a Million- aire? Secrets & Surprises A behind-the-scenes look at the long-running game show. 10 p.m. ABC Broken PlacesThis new special explores how trauma in childhood shapes people’s lives as they become adults. 10 p.m. KOCE

TALK SHOWS CBS This MorningLeVar Burton. (N) 7 a.m. KCBS Today(N) 7 a.m. KNBC Good Morning America (N) 7 a.m. KABC Live With Kelly and Ryan Jon Cryer (“Supergirl”); Laura Prepon. (N) 9 a.m. KABC The View(N) 10 a.m. KABC The Talk(N) 1 p.m. KCBS Tamron HallHow the pandemic impacts children in underserved communities. (N) 1 p.m. KABC The Dr. Oz Show(N) 1 p.m. KTTV The Kelly Clarkson Show Matt LeBlanc; Bellamy Young. (N) 2 p.m. KNBC Dr. PhilMedical workers fighting the coronavirus. (N) 3 p.m. KCBS To the ContraryJen Wong. (N) 6 p.m. KVCR Amanpour and Company (N) 11 p.m. KCET; midnight KVCR; 1 a.m. KLCS ConanKevin Bacon. (N) 11 p.m. TBS The Tonight Show Justin Timberlake; Lady Gaga; Billie Joe Armstrong per- forms. (N) 11:34 p.m. KNBC Late Night Tracy Morgan. (N) 12:37 a.m. KNBC NightlineCoronavirus. (N) 12:37 a.m. KABC

MOVIES

Logan(2017) 11 a.m. FX Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood(2019) 12:05 p.m. Starz The Old Man & the Gun (2018) 2:25 p.m. Cinemax Widows(2018) 5:50 p.m. Cinemax Fighting With My Family (2019) 6:05 p.m. Epix Mad Max: Fury Road(2015) 6:30 p.m. Syfy A Star Is Born(2018) 6:40 p.m. HBO Black Panther(2018) 7:45 p.m. TNT

Michele K. ShortHBO WINONA RYDERin “The Plot Against America” on HBO.

TV Highlights

We have become a nation
of castaways, combing the
bandwidth from a hundred
million islands fearfully,
hopefully for news.
Key to this new way of liv-
ing is the press conference —
local, state, national, airing,
streaming, reporters in at-
tendance or calling in. (And
sometimes no reporters at
all.) Purely as information,
you could learn it all from the
newspaper — subscribe
today! — but we come not
just for the facts but for the
performance. We come for
the reassuring voice, the
confident body posture, the
air, if we’re lucky in our chain
of leaders, of competence.
We come even for the look of
distress that says Someone
Cares. And, oddly, we are as
close to the mayor, the gov-
ernor, the president in our
current predicament as we
are to nearly all our friends
and relations — just a screen
away.
One might imagine that,
in a time when anyone in the
world might upload a video
to a place where anyone in
the world might see it, the
act of appearing on camera
would have lost some of its
meaning. But an aura of con-
sequence, of urgency, of
event still surrounds these
meetings of important peo-
ple with the press and the
public beyond — not least, of
course, because they con-
cern a virus that might kill
any of usand has in short or-
der changed the way we live.
They amplify what was
already a tradition. Wood-
row Wilson held the first
presidential press confer-
ence in 1913 — the White
House Correspondents’
Ass n. formed a year later —
and they have been a feature
of every administration
since, though held in differ-
ent settings at different in-
tervals. (There are no rules.)
Early pressers, out of public
view, could be informal, even
collaborative, not com-
pletely on-the-record affairs.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was
the first to put one on televi-
sion, in 1955, though it was
shot on film and edited; JFK
was the first to go live and
uneditedon TV, days after
his inauguration in 1961. The
present occupant of 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. has been
all over the television, for
hours, in recent weeks.
A conference may state a
case, and might be called on
to defend it. It may deliver a
hard truth or spin an incon-
venient one. Lawyers on
courtroom steps reinforce

the narrative they’ve been unspooling inside; movie stars shine their light upon the world. When the news is soft (“Tell us about your new picture”), some puffery is ex- pected; in serious matters, it is good to be, or at least sound, authentically honest. Broadcast live, a conference tells us something ex- tra about character, something a transcript can’t ex- press. I look at my mayor, Eric Garcetti, and governor, Gavin Newsom, a little dif- ferently, and certainly more charitably, having watched them at work, moderating a crisis. It was the Beatles’ music that charmed Ameri- can youth, back in 1964, but their press conferenceswon over the parents. (“What do you think of Beethoven?” Ringo: “Great. Especially his poems.”)

A nation listens This rapidly evolving (yet somehow slow-rolling) emergency demands fre- quent communication. Trump’s TV briefings — lengthenings, I guess we could call them — are piv- otal, certainly, to under- standing the moment, if not always in the way he intends, and most valuable when he steps aside to let the experts talk. But to get a clearer picture of what’s up in America —a picture of things getting done — I recommend a visit to the country’s governors and mayors, who are closer to the front line and whose meetings with the press and public are generally available on YouTube or a dedi- cated government website. Many play close varia- tions on a theme: The offi- cials appear, flanked by flags, with doctors and ad- ministrators on hand, sometimes joined by a general, as the Army Corps of Engi- neers arrives in one theater

of viral war after another to turn stadiums and hotels and convention centers into field hospitals. Many employ ASL interpreters for deaf viewers — though New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo does not, nor does the White House. Especially at the city level, the briefings may be more informal. (I’m looking at you, Fort Lee, N.J., Mayor Mark Sokolich.) Cuomo’s daily press conferenceshave attracted national interest because New York is further into the crisis than elsewhere and because Cuomo himself proj- ects an easygoing, empathetic sort of tough loveand sounds like Al Pacino, not overacting. I don’t know much about Cuomo, apart from his illustrious parent- age, but I note that many constituents not otherwise inclined to like him seem to now. (According to a CNN report, Cuomo’s briefings are “mandatory viewing” in the West Wingas well.) Even from 3,000 miles away, listening to Cuomo can reduce stress, not because he sugarcoats but because he shoots straight: “Calibrate yourself and your expectations so you’re not disappointed every morning you get up.” But he also gets personal, usually to a broader point, talking about reforming family tradition in a remotely connecting world, chiding his kid brother — broadcast jour- nalist Chris Cuomo, cur- rently quarantinedwith the coronavirus — for having spent time with their mother. At the Jacob Javits Cen- ter, made over into a hospital, he addressedthe Army Corps of Engineers in a sort of off-the-cuff echo of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from “Henry V”: “This is a moment that is going to change this nation ... and 10 years

from now you’ll be talking about today to your children or your grandchildren, and you will shed a tear because you will remember the lives lost and you’ll remember the faces and the names, and you’ll remember how hard we worked and we still lost loved ones. ... But you will also be proud. .... When other people played it safe, you had the courage to show up.”

Newsom up close Closer to where I shelter in place there is Gov. New- som, who is tall and youthful and gets up close to the camera, projecting a kind of Northern California eas- iness that falls somewhere between friendly politician and local television host; in another life, and easier time, I can see him hosting a children’s show, with puppets. He likes to call California a “nation state,” which, for a native, reinforces the com- forting sense of a bulwark against whatever madness might reign elsewhere. “I completely reject this notion that we are destined to any particular fate; it’s de- cisions, not conditions, that determine our future,” he said recently. Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti, who conducts his briefings from behind a lectern in the middle dis- tance in a paneled room — it’s like a 12th-row view — comes across as a kind of in- spirational technocrat: “We have not seen the darkest days, but we will march for- ward, and we’ll march for- ward together.” Neither governor nor mayor is political in his broadcasts except in the sense that avoiding politics may itself bring tangible re- wards, might open doors that otherwise would stay closed. (Though Trump has attacked Newsom in the past, he now regularly

praiseshis work on the pandemic.) Until Tuesday, Trump seemed barely to have reck- oned the human cost of the pandemicand certainly not its enormity. Through whatever combination of inten- tion, ignorance or mental in- discipline, Trump is a habit- ual stater of untruths and half-truths, and this vague fog of fancy and fact — hy- perbolic, sloppy, hypnoti- cally repetitious — keeps his rhetoric slippery. There is a lot of noise surrounding his signal, and he can swallow great tracts of time without actually saying much. Asked in late February if he thought the virus would spread, his reply was literally all over the place. “I don’t think it’s inevitable. It probably will. It possibly will. It could be at a very small level or it could be at a larger level. Whatever happens, we’re to- tally prepared.” Or perhaps not. Indeed, the question has been raised among media critics and news outlets whether it is worth covering Trump’s briefings live and unfiltered, given that they contain much misinforma- tion, some of which may lead viewers to dangerous action, or inaction. It’s a big country, and some part of it will obvi- ously find in these briefings exactly the psychological balm it needs — notwith- standing the name-calling, blame-shifting, aspersion- casting, self-congratu- lations, history-rewriting, conspiracy-theorizing, kow- tow-receiving and cam- paigning. Indeed, the president has boasted on Twitter of his “Bachelor finale, Mon- day Night Football type numbers,” numbers he ap- parently interprets entirely as a token of support, rather than, say, driven by fear of sickness, death and the col- lapse of civilization. There are numbers and there are numbers. At the task force’s Tuesday briefing, that fatalities would be enormous even if things go well seemed to have finally sunk in, as perhaps had the idea that nothing Trump could say would stop it — that this isn’t the flu, nor a hoax cooked up by a Demo- cratic cabal. For whatever reason — whether images he’d seen from Elmhurst Hospital in his old neighborhood in Queens or that, as has been reported, internal polling showed that voters preferred stricter measures in slowing the pandemic — Trump appeared, if not chastened, at least quieted. He left off the usual sniping and for a moment got out of the way of his advisors. Then came Wednesday’s briefing. “Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook?” said Trump. “I just found out I’m No. 1 on Facebook.”

Who are the voices of reason?

President Trump has a

big microphone, but

governors and mayors

draw rapt listeners.

ROBERT LLOYD
TELEVISION CRITIC

NEW YORKGov. Andrew Cuomo, center, has been empathetic but firm in his coronavirus talks and briefings. New Yorkers are listening. So is much of America.

John MinchilloAssociated Press

The young actress Raffey
Cassidy has a gaze that is
somehow both inquisitive
and ferocious; it poses ques-
tions that could cut through
glass. If you saw her in “Vox
Lux” or “The Killing of a Sa-
cred Deer,” you might recall
her presence more than any-
thing else, her watchful in-
telligence and eerie, preter-
natural calm.
She’s as arresting as ever
in the visually immaculate if
dramatically muddled chill-
er “The Other Lamb,” in
which she plays a teenager
who has grown up within an
incestuous, polygamous sex
cult — part “Handmaid’s
Tale,” part “Martha Marcy
May Marlene” — and gradu-
ally realizes that the experi-
ence may not be great for her
long-term well-being.
The viewer will arrive at
this conclusion mere mo-
ments after the story begins,
probably around the time
Selah (Cassidy) and some of
her many sisters, wearing
near-identical blue dresses,
make their way across a
mountain landscape toward
the cluster of wooded cabins
they call home. By the time
they’re sitting down oppo-
site their mothers, who are
all clad in heavily symbolic
red, the creepiness factor is

off the charts. These women are the obedient wives and daughters — who will them- selves eventually become wives — of a man known only as the Shepherd (Michiel Huisman of “Game of Thrones”). His shoulder- length Jesus locks are hardly the extent of his self-styled Messiah act. Selah is the Shepherd’s favorite daughter, though not having come of age, she has yet to receive the “grace” that he alone can give. The administering of that grace —said to purify each young woman after the apparent defilement of her first period —is mercifully left to the imagination. While the cult in question is not exactly religious, the Shepherd’s agenda can be read, in some ways, as a gro- tesque derangement of the 23rd Psalm. (The verse “He maketh me lie down in green pastures” has rarely taken on such revolting over- tones.) The lambs, for their part, are literal as well as fig- urative: The women tend their own small flock of sheep, one of which Selah finds mauled to death on a hillside one afternoon in a bloody omen of the horrors to come. From the outset, then, you want Selah to run screaming from this hellish commune — or, better yet, to take a blowtorch to the Shepherd’s rod and staff. You also want explanations, or at least clues, that Cath- erine S. McMullen’s screen- play is teasingly slow to pro-

vide. But Cassidy persua- sively inhabits the psychological bondage of a young woman who, like her sisters, has known no life other than this one. Besides allowing no one to criticize or contradict him, the Shepherd has also decreed that no one but he can tell stories of any kind: Owning one’s narrative, after all, would be tantamount to a kind of freedom. The filmmaker telling this particular story is the

Polish writer-director Mal- gorzata Szumowska, whose tense and provocative earlier features (including “In the Name Of ” and “Elles”) have explored the outer limits of youthful sexuality and for- bidden desireas well as the bonds between the spirit and the flesh. Here, the ex- quisite stillness of her compositions (the work of her longtime cinematographer, Michal Englert) works in ele- gant counterpoint to the tensions roiling beneath the surface. The deftly balanced colors and symmetrical compositions seem to mock the characters and their in- creasingly dire straits, im- posing a sense of order that will soon be revealed as un- sustainable. It’s worth noting that the word “Selah” appears re- peatedly throughout the

Psalms; you could think of it as a kind of “amen,” an occa- sion to pause and reflect. The Selah of “The Other Lamb” acts as a more sub- versive kind of interrupter. Her coming of age is marked by eerie visitations and dark, hallucinatory visions (including much sub-“Carrie” menstrual imagery), and her smarts allow her to see the cracks and fissures in the Shepherd’s not-so- grand design before the other women do. One mother (Denise Gough), cast aside and banished by the Shepherd, does her part to steer Selah toward the light. All this is absorbing enough without generating much in the way of real ter- ror, tension or surprise. As an outside threat sends the Shepherd and his flock packing and in search of a new home, it becomes clear that this dread-soaked parable of female vengeance can end in only one way, which may be why Szu- mowska doesn’t linger on the violent final passages. The most powerful moment comes earlier, when Selah peers out toward a road and catches a cruel glimpse of freedom, of the life that might have been — and still might be — hers. As a study in atmospheric seclusion, “The Other Lamb” is beauti- fully crafted enough to hold your attention, but you can’t shake the feeling that Se- lah’s next chapter — and Cassidy’s — might well be the more interesting movie.

MOVIE REVIEW

‘Other Lamb’ a creepy cult drama

Poland’s Malgorzata

Szumowska delivers

English-language tale

of female revenge.

JUSTIN CHANG
FILM CRITIC

‘The Other

Lamb’

Not rated Running time:1 hour, 37 minutes Playing:Available on IFC Midnight

RAFFEY CASSIDYportrays Selah opposite Michiel Huisman as the Shepherd in “The Other Lamb.”

IFC Films

Los Angeles Times - 06.04.2020

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources