People who believe that they don't make good films anymore simply don't know where to look. There are a lot of good films being made out there. Many of them simply aren't marketed very much or very well, but even when good movies are marketed well, it's still very difficult to pick out what's good from the endless parade of trash being made for the brain-dead boobeoisie such as oh, say, The Da Vinci Code.
Saint Ralph (2005) is one of those pleasant surprises that I recently encountered. I found it during a search on young directors - in this case Michael McGowan, who also wrote the screenplay. It's basically a sports film about a yougn man who, due to his younthful misunderstanding of how miracles work, thinks that winning the Boston Marathon will bring his stricken mother out of a coma.
Particularly notable about the film is that the film takes place at a Catholic school in 1950's Canada, and shockingly, the priests are actually good people, and whole world of 1950's Catholicism has a benign and even inspiring influence on Ralph. There are lots of religious-themed jokes ("Necking is a venial sin, not a mortal one.," says one girl), and there's some interesting talk about anarchists: "Neitzsche said that the anarchist and Christian have a common origin...as far as anarchists go, Neitzsche really had nothing on Christ."
