the audience applauded

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Movies reflect the values of the people who make them. Most of those people are Liberal or even Leftist. So you get thousands of movies per year with a Liberal or Leftist perspective. One of those perspectives is that religion sucks.Whenever I see Danny Glover listed in the cast of anything other than Lethal Weapon, I expect some kind of touchy-feely message.Yet I would not consider this film anti-Catholic. Our main character is very earnest in wanting to serve both God and his congregation. He just struggles with his faith, like many people. The three-man staff of the parish is meant to represent different potential versions of priests. One is old and conservative, one is old and a bit cynical and silly, but still committed, and one is young and confused. To their credit the film makers did not make the old conservative one out to be a bad guy. No one molests children or does immoral things. But what disturbed me was that the spoiled, cynical slacker-woman character is portrayed as the righteous one who teaches life lessons to the out-of-touch clergy. Yet her life is a mess. That part is typical Indie glorification of melancholia. While the dialog hinted at profundity, it never quite gets there. The Glover character does challenge the silly woman, but he is made out to look rude, while she's the hipster. Someone should have told the main young character to loosen up, instead of just implying it. Meanwhile someone should have told the woman that trendy self-pity and dishonesty are not becoming. The Midwest college town setting and slow pace are refreshing compared to the typical L.A., New York, Chicago, Miami redundancy. But pregnant pauses and focused shots of a contemplative face do not create depth. The dialog still has to do its job.

The first hour was mind numbingly slow. The ending was as predictable as any other random chick flick. From a production standpoint The Good Catholic leaves much to be desired. It's 2017 and we're still making movies about priests falling in love? I sort of expected something that would make me think a bit more. From a catholic perspective it's clear the movie is an attack on clerical celibacy and pre-k bible interpretation. From a critical perspective, please save your time and money and spend 90 minutes doing something else instead of watching this low budget, predictable, and theologically infantile made for TV movie.

I think the ending is disgraceful. It is not an open one but it tells us exactly that they will stay together. I think that people have a free will and decide what they want to do with their life at some point as grown ups and should make a fixed commitment to what they do independently if it is being a priest or getting married, etc. So giving a permission to someone to make up his mind in the middle of the process by just saying it is all about love is not fair. Grass is always greener on the other side, I know that being a priest is tough, no family, loneliness, but being in a marriage today and keeping it lifelong is also a real challenge, so whatever our vocation is in this life I think we should stick to it and try harder to make it work because giving up is the easiest way to do but brings regrets after all.

THE GOOD CATHOLIC finds a decent young man trying to follow a path set out for him by his father, that of a Catholic priest. We can sense from the first scene his restlessness in the confines of this dogma-bound and tightly constricted role. He yearns for meaning in life and thought to satisfy that yearning in the priesthood but finds himself embracing phantoms until an edgy and clever young woman enters his life. She claims to be dying but touches him with her spark of individuality and suddenly he understands his life can be more than a period of long waiting for the end, more than fear of hell and hope of heaven. The movie evokes very powerfully the deep yearning of youth for a lifetime story of love and meaning, for experiencing something intense and alive before it's too late, the awful fear that youth has that it will never be young.