Year: 1999

But The Rainmaker is based on a John Grisham novel, and Rudy is a Grisham hero — moral, upright, and really, really cute. Put it down to Damon’s skill that we can suspect that his Rudy mightn’t be such a nice guy after all, not just in the one scene above but at yet another contract-signing, as he agrees to handle the will of an old lady who, yikes, wants to leave her riches to a televangelist because ‘his jet is getting old.’

What is it with Boston lawyers lately? The Practice (one of the few TV shows I make a point of watching) sees Beantown shysters in moral anguish if one of them sneezes. Ally McBeal turns them into idiosyncratic goofballs. And now A Civil Action punishes them for finally doing what we always say we want lawyers to do: have a heart.

For a while, as I watched The Prince of Egypt, I thought there was a sly, subversive undertone at work. There’s a marvelous scene in the film in which Moses and two Egyptian priests engage in a kind of ‘my god can beat up your god’ battle, and Ra and friends do seem to hold their own against Yahweh. I thought: Wow, the filmmakers are daring to give the Egyptian gods the same credence they’re giving the Hebrew one — in effect saying that Ra is as likely to exist as Yahweh.

Why did Disney even bother with The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride? To cash in on the success — not just in theaters but also on video — of its predecessor, of course. Kids, though, especially the preschoolers who are probably the only ones who’ll enjoy this bland sequel, are perfectly content to watch the same movie over and over and over, to their parents’ distraction. Disney could have just rereleased The Lion King with a new label slapped on it, and kids wouldn’t care.