UP WITH PAPAL

Opening this week:

Pope Francis: A Man of his Word--German filmmaker Wim Wenders, of Wings of Desire and The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, directed this documentary about the current pontiff. It's more a present-tense portrait than a biography. We don't get much about his background, or about the unusual circumstances of his election; unless I missed it there was no mention of his predecessor Benedict XVI, who retired in 2013. Instead, Wenders shows us Francis traveling the world and interacting with people, and we get substantive talking-head interviews with him, in which he explains his interests.

As a non-Catholic, but the veteran of a Catholic liberal education, I've been a fan of this guy since his election. I had a bumper sticker on my old truck with his picture, reading THIS POPE GIVES ME HOPE. The first from the Americas and from the Southern Hemisphere, he's the Pope many of us never thought we'd see: the vociferous environmentalist and anti-consumerist, the tolerant ecumenical, and above all the staunch champion of the poor. Incredibly (or maybe not), he's the first Pope ever to take the name Francis, in honor of Francis of Assisi. He seems almost too good to be true--a part of me keeps waiting, I confess, for the other Shoe of the Fisherman to drop.

But that doesn't happen in this movie, at any rate. When we see him embracing destitute or sick or displaced people all over the world, or lecturing a bunch of stony-faced Cardinals, or addressing a joint house of Congress in the U.S., or just chatting with the camera in his wry, smiling, self-deprecating, yet direct manner, he's extremely hard not to like.

A sadness hangs over the film, however, because at the moment, the fear-mongering leaders of the global superpowers seem to have little interest in this Pope's values, and we citizens of the developed world don't seem to be much in the mood for his notion that we can all be "a little poorer" for the benefit of our neighbors, and of the planet. The melancholy narration by Wenders seems to reflect the doubt that this cheerful, seemingly good man's vision for the world can take hold, and I understand how he feels. This Pope does indeed give me hope, but not enough of his fellow world leaders do.

Anything--Devastated and unsuccessfully suicidal after the death of his wife, fifty-something insurance man Early Landry (John Carroll Lynch) moves from small-town Mississippi to L.A. at the insistence of his rich, fretful younger sister Laurette (Maura Tierney). Much to her horror, he ends up taking a small apartment in a gritty area of Hollywood, where he develops a bond with Frida (Matt Bomer) the beautiful street hustler in the apartment next door.

Written and directed by Timothy McNeil, this is the newest and maybe the gentlest of the movies in which small-town men connect with transgender divas and find their lives enriched. McNeil's dialogue is sentimental but speakable and sweet, and his direction showcases the actors well.

The movie is no great shakes, but it's about time somebody gave a juicy star part to the excellent Lynch, who's been a reliable, lovable presence for years, whether that meant providing emotional support to Marge as Norm "Son of a" Gunderson in Fargo or nobly wading through lava in Volcano. He underplays Early with estimable discipline, and Bomer's wary, intelligent but emotionally hungry Frida stares at him, startled at his capacity for love.

Show Dogs--There's not much idiocy and insipidity I won't put up with if it affords me the chance to watch cute dogs. So believe me when I tell you that this talking-dog comedy is to be avoided at all costs. Even for mush-brained dog lovers, this one is atrocious. The CGI pasted on to the faces of the canine stars robs them of their personalities.

Directed by Raja Gosnell of the Smurfs movies, it's a cop-buddy parody in which FBI man Will Arnett and a NYC police Rottweiler voiced by Chris "Ludacris" Bridges travel together to Las Vegas to infiltrate an illegal-animal trade happening behind the scenes at a dog show at Caesar's Palace. It's sort of a cross between Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Miss Congeniality, but the comparison is an insult even to those movies.

Stanley Tucci plays a papillon called Philippe, who coaches the tough Rottie in the ways of the dog show, a la Michael Caine in Miss Congeniality. The voice cast also includes Gabriel Iglesias, Jordin Sparks, RuPaul, Alan Cumming and Shaquille O'Neal, while Natasha Lyonne turns up as Arnett's love interest. All of these people have had finer hours, and hopefully will again.

OK, I'll admit that there's a fantasy sequence that spoofs Dirty Dancing that made me laugh out loud, once. Part of me hesitates to give the movie even that much credit, but if you run out and see Show Dogs on that basis, I suppose I can't be blamed for your misfortune.

EVEN BLUE GIRLS GET THE BLUES

Opening this week:

Smurfs: The Lost Village—The third entry in Sony's Smurf series focuses on Smurfette, the lone female among the tiny blue-skinned residents of Smurf Village. The first two films in this series, from 2011 and 2013, were both directed by Raja Gosnell and mixed animation with live action. The Lost Village is all animated, and eschews any visits to the human world. The plot concerns the discovery of a previously unknown neighboring Smurf village, and the quest by Smurfette and some of her friends to warn its inhabitants of a threat from the sinister wizard Gargamel and his much more observant cat Azreal.

In case you've managed to remain unfamiliar with the elfin race created in the late '50s by the Belgian cartoonist Pierre "Peyo" Culliford, the Smurfs (originally "Les Schtroumpfs") are named according to their defining characteristic, as in Brainy Smurf, Clumsy Smurf, Nosey Smurf, Paranoid Smurf, etc. Only Smurfette lacks a signature trait. She has a rather Manichaean backstory, having been created by Gargamel as an agent against the Smurfs, then won over to the side of light by exposure to their relentless niceness. But she feels incomplete without her very own adjective.

The movie's acknowledgement of the presumption, longstanding in the narrative traditions of our culture, that Smurfette's gender is sufficient by itself to define her, is potentially interesting. But nothing much is done with it, beyond acknowledgement, and otherwise this is a pretty by-the-numbers animated kid flick. It's watchable enough, but about the most that can be said for it is that it's inoffensive.

Demi Lovato replaces the earlier film's Katy Perry as the voice of Smurfette, while Rainn Wilson does his usual droll work as the voice of Gargamel, replacing the live-action version of Hank Azaria. Mandy Patinkin replaces the late Jonathan Winters as Papa Smurf, while the leader of the newly discovered village is voiced by Julia Roberts. Strange to think that the Pretty Woman herself is ready for matriarch roles.

ACT/BLUE

The standard-issue movie-critic superlatives—“riveting,” “stunning”—certainly apply to The Act of Killing. The trouble is that none of them seem adequate. This is one of the most astounding and challenging documentaries I’ve ever seen, and I’m not ready, after one viewing, to offer more than a few initial thoughts on it.

The title is a grim joke. The film is about murder, but it’s also about the re-enactment—the astonishingly willing re-enactment—of murder by the perpetrators. The focus is on a few jovial middle-aged guys, most notably a certain Anwar Congo, who back in 1965, in the wake of the Indonesian Revolution, killed countless people accused of being Communists on behalf the new regime. Many of these cutthroats were small-potatoes gangsters who came to be regarded as national heroes through their association with the founding of the paramilitary party Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth). Anwar Congo, a North Sumatran, may have personally killed as many as a thousand people.

This is no typical historical chronicle of a human rights outrage, however. The director, the American Joshua Oppenheimer, uses little in the way of archival photos or footage—maybe none, if memory serves—and I don’t think the names Sukarno or Suharto are ever mentioned. The film takes place very much in the present, in which Anwar and others act out their murders, with no trace of embarrassment and no evident fear of consequence, for Oppenheimer’s camera. These aren’t casual re-enactments, either—they’re staged vignettes, in the style of the gangster pictures these guys love.

Among the many discomforts which The Act of Killing visits on us is one that particularly hits home for those of us in the movie critic and movie buff communities who have long insisted that violence in films has no causal relation to real-life violence. It becomes a good deal harder to be confident of that position after listening to Oppenheimer’s subjects cheerfully discuss the inspiration for their crimes coming from Marlon Brando or Al Pacino movies. It also left me wondering if movies were what allowed these men to dissociate from what they were doing, to see it as unreal.

The Act of Killing is, in a sense, a difficult movie to like, since some of the participants, who play the victims in the re-enactments, are clearly terrified—including some children. It’s disingenuous, after Oppenheimer has filmed children in these potentially traumatic psychodramas, to hear him object from behind the camera when Anwar wants to watch footage from the film with his grandsons.

The result of this viewing is fateful. The last scene of The Act of Killing, which shows Anwar’s reaction when he revisits the scene of his crimes, is, I think, among the most horrifying, heartbreaking, jaw-dropping couple of minutes I've seen in any movie ever. While the movie would still be a unique and shocking expose without it, this scene takes it to the level of Shakespearean tragedy.

To discuss The Smurfs 2 after The Act of Killing seems almost obscene. But the sequel to the 2011 kid movie starring the little blue gnomes created in the ‘50s by the Belgian comic artist Pierre “Peyo” Culliford opens this weekend, and while it’s no classic, like its predecessor it isn’t without a self-mocking wit. In the first film the Smurfs had an adventure in Manhattan; in The Smurfs 2, in a dazzlingly innovative twist, they have an adventure in Paris.

Also like its predecessor, with whom it shares the director Raja Gosnell, Smurfs 2 offers a pretty funny performance by Hank Azaria as the villainous wizard Gargamel. Stranded in our world at the end of the previous film, Gargamel has become a success as a stage magician in the City of Light, and has also created two non-blue quasi-Smurfs, Vexy and Hackus. Through a dimensional portal, the sorcerer abducts Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry) in order to steal her “Smurf Essence,” with which he can turn his tiny homunculi blue and use them to infiltrate Smurf Village.

The Smurfs 2 was the last film of the great Jonathan Winters, who passed on in April, and to whom it’s dedicated. He provided the kindly voice of Papa Smurf, and he got to intone the movie’s moral: That it doesn’t matter where you come from, what matters is who you choose to be. A platitude, maybe, but some platitudes are better than others, and this one struck me as better than average.

ROTOR OATER

Aviation &/or obscure western movie geeks, be advised: Friday at 8 p.m. EST Turner Classic Movies shows Under Mexicali Stars, a 1950 yarn from Republic Studios, starring Rex Allen (“The Arizona Cowboy”) and his sidekick Homer (Buddy Ebsen), this time on the trail of nefarious counterfeiters. It’s a perfectly ordinary singing-cowboy programmer of the period, with one exception—a helicopter, at that time a newfangled contraption, plays a major role.

The villains use what appears to be a Hiller UH12A to purloin wagonloads of gold without a trace, little knowing that on one such run the intrepid Rex (in reality one of Republic’s gang of crazed stuntmen, no doubt) has grabbed hold of the aircraft’s wheelgear and hitched a ride to their hideout.

Homer, meanwhile, unravels the mystery to the authorities in this burst of Shakespearean exposition: “It explains the vanishing footprints…How they stole the gold without leavin’ a trace…With those things you don’t even have to touch the ground, so no wheelprints!” During the climactic scenes, the villains use the craft to pursue our hero, and when Rex at last gets the upper hand, the final baddie standing makes a desperate dash for the craft before Rex flattens him.

This all-but-forgotten little horse opera was released in 1950, barely four years after the Bell 47 first hit the civilian market. It may be one of the first feature films in which a helicopter is a crucial plot point.

Several RIPs: To poor Amy Winehouse, passed on at just 27, to Broadway & TV character actor Tom Aldredge, at 83, to the luscious original “Bond Girl” Linda Christian, at 87, & to veteran producer & production designer Polly Platt, at 72.

Early in his career Raja Gosnell, director of The Smurfs, which opens tomorrow, was editor of…

Monster-of-the-Week: …1986's Monster in the Closet, an amusingly literal piece of schlock spoof from Troma. So the title character, who surprisingly does not resemble Marcus Bachmann, is this week’s honoree…

My fondest memory of this film is a scene near the beginning, in which John Carradine plays a blind man whose service dog likes to hide his white cane from him. As I recall, the furious Carradine assures the dog that he will have his revenge, because though he can’t see, he can “hear an ant piss on a sponge.”