Movie Reviews: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Friday the 13th, Gomorrah

POLANSKI: UNAUTHORIZED A fictionalized chronicle of the life, art and disgraceful European exile of the Chinatown director, written, produced, directed by and starring B-movie actor-director Damian Chapa (El Padrino: The Mexican Godfather). Though it’s a near thing, the movie isn’t quite bad enough to qualify as a classic tone-deaf vanity production; it isn’t The Room. Chapa plays the director passably well, and even manages a decent Polish accent when the auteur is berating underlings or popping pills and pawing at actresses, but he resorts to scrunching up his face and yelling when there are big emotions to express. Chapa appears to view the diminutive pedophile as an innocent abroad (“This isn’t Europe, Mr. Polanski,” growls a bullet-headed cop), though there’s a whiff of an implication that his involvement with a Satanist technical adviser on Rosemary’s Baby may have had a maligned influence on his destiny. Still, Chapa earns our gratitude by staging very discreetly the Manson family slaughter of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate (lookalike Brienne De Beau). Another mercy: Leah Grimsson, the actress cast as the tween blonde Polanski drugged and raped, is a young woman who caught a final glimpse of 13 in her rearview mirror several summers ago. (Sunset 5) (David Chute)

GO  THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK With Milk in the Oscar spotlight, now is the perfect moment to look back at the previous film on the same subject, The Times of Harvey Milk. A lot has happened in the 25 years between Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning 1984 documentary and Gus Van Sant’s biopic, but the subject of the nation’s signal gay rights leader is as relevant as ever, especially in light of the ongoing fight over Prop 8. But back in the 1970s, Prop 6 was a far more dire deal that would have mandated the firing of both gay school teachers and their supporters. Milk’s successful oppositional campaign is one of the highlights of a film filled with interviews of many of his most important friends and allies, bringing to light a man who in his brief but incredibly consequential life was, as straight union rep Jim Elliot discovered, “the kind of guy who’s going to talk about you.” Milk’s ability to link gay rights to the struggles of all the disenfranchised made his fame. Epstein’s film concentrates on this over his personal life (which dominates Milk). We do, however see a lot of Milk’s assassin, Dan White, and the mockery of a trial in which the horrendous double murder of Milk and Mayor George Moscone proves of scant concern to a rigged jury crying copious tears over White himself. White, who served only five-and-a-half years for manslaughter was still alive when The Times of Harvey Milk was first released. He committed suicide shortly afterwards. (Downtown Independent) (David Ehrenstein)

TWO LOVERS If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation. But though Two Lovers is based on a Dostoevsky story, Gray’s lack of interpretive distance from his subject, coupled with extreme overacting from his lead actor, results in melodrama that sits up and begs to be farce. As Leonard, a jilted 30-something who’s moved back in with his Brighton Beach Jewish parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov), Phoenix lays on the pimply-youth body language so thick that it wouldn’t be surprising to see him twitch at his underpants. This shambling mama’s boy quickly becomes irresistible to two luscious beauties from opposite ends of his comfort zone: nice Jewish girl Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) and shiksa Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a neurotic tease who summons him to nocturnal rooftop summits about the uneven progress of her affair with a married man. What follows is a clumsy stab at Vertigo laced with bits of Marty. What you make of Leonard’s behavior at the end of Two Lovers may depend on whether you read It’s a Wonderful Life as the uplifting tale of a depressive redeemed from suicide, or the tragedy of a man who gave up adventure for a domestic cocoon. (The Landmark; Sunset 5; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Ella Taylor)