Brian Grazer Movies

The naughty little monkey from Margret Rey and H.A. Rey's beloved children's stories makes the leap to the big screen in this animated adaptation. Ted (voice of Will Ferrell) is an explorer with a large yellow hat who is good friends with Bloomsberry (voice of Dick Van Dyke), who runs a natural history museum. Bloomsberry's greedy son, Bloomsberry Junior (voice of David Cross), wants to tear down his dad's museum and put a parking ramp in its place, but the elder Bloomsberry is convinced that a spectacular new exhibit could save the museum from the wrecking ball. Ted heads to Africa on an expedition to find some special artifacts that will keep his friend in business, but while he's there he befriends a playful monkey he calls George (voice of Frank Welker). While George is friendly, he has a taste for mischief and seems to always get Ted in hot water; Ted thinks he's seen the last of his simian friend when his ship heads back to America, until he discovers that George managed to hide aboard the boat before it set sail. Ted's search for a eye-catching exhibit proved to be a failure, and Ted and his good friend Maggie (voice of Drew Barrymore), a schoolteacher who's sweet on him, struggle to find of a way to save Bloomsberry's museum. But time becomes precious for Ted when George has an entire new city to explore. Curious George features a handful of original songs composed for the film by surfer-turned-singer/songwriter Jack Johnson. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Dan Brown's controversial best-selling novel about a powerful secret that's been kept under wraps for thousands of years comes to the screen in this suspense thriller from director Ron Howard. The stately silence of Paris' Louvre museum is broken when one of the gallery's leading curators is found dead on the grounds, with strange symbols carved into his body and left around the spot where he died. Hoping to learn the significance of the symbols, police bring in Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a gifted cryptographer who is also the victim's granddaughter. Needing help, Sophie calls on Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a leading symbologist from the United States. As Sophie and Robert dig deeper into the case, they discover the victim's involvement in the Priory of Sion, a secret society whose members have been privy to forbidden knowledge dating back to the birth of Christianity. In their search, Sophie and Robert happen upon evidence that could lead to the final resting place of the Holy Grail, while members of the priory and an underground Catholic society known as Opus Dei give chase, determined to prevent them from sharing their greatest secrets with the world. Also starring Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, and Alfred Molina, The Da Vinci Code was shot on location in France and the United Kingdom; the Louvre allowed the producers to film at the famous museum, but scenes taking place at Westminster Abbey had to filmed elsewhere when church officials declined permission. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Take a walk on the fine line between box-office blockbusters and instantly forgettable bombs as Oscar and Emmy-winning producer/director Bill Couturie sets out to explore just what separates such high-profile hits as Jaws from such room-clearing disasters as Howard the Duck. Executive produced by Variety editor Peter Bart, this documentary includes interviews with such movie industry heavies as Steven Spielberg, Danny DeVito, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Evans, Pierce Brosnan, and Sydney Pollack, exploring precisely how the road to the Razzies is paved with good intentions. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The true story of an athlete who achieved his greatest success against the most daunting odds of his life is brought to the screen in this historical drama. In the 1920s, James Braddock (Russell Crowe) from Bergen, NJ, was a promising contender in professional boxing; he had strength, spirit, and tenacity, but the combination of a serious hand injury and a 1929 defeat in a bout with light heavyweight champ Tommy Loughran sent his career into a serious tailspin. As Braddock's career in the ring dried up, the Great Depression put a stake through the heart of America's economy, and Braddock found himself working at the New York docks for pitiful wages as he tried to support his wife, Mae (Renée Zellweger), and three children. Desperate for money, Braddock turned to his former trainer and manager Joe Gould (Paul Giamatti), who was unexpectedly able to scare up a bout for him, battling John Griffin at Madison Square Garden. While conventional wisdom had it that Braddock was too old, out of shape, and out of practice to have any chance of winning, he defeated Griffin, and continued beating his opponents with a powerful left hook that had been intensified by years of punishing dock work. In a nation desperate for good news, Braddock's surprising comeback became a tonic to struggling workers and unemployed people, and all eyes were on Braddock when in 1935 he took on powerful heavyweight champion Max Baer (Craig Bierko) in what was both literally and figuratively the fight of his life. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A not-so-ordinary family finds a new way of paying the bills in this comedy. Dick Harper (Jim Carrey) and his wife, Jane (Téa Leoni), would seem to have it made -- Dick has a high-paying job, they live in an expensive house in the suburbs, they have two luxury cars in the driveway, and a housekeeper, Blanca (Gloria Garayua), to help look after their son, Billy. But Dick and Jane's fairy-tale life crashes head-on into reality when the firm Dick works for turns out to have been using unscrupulous accounting methods to disguise the fact they've been losing money hand over fist, and Dick has been made the fall guy for some of their dirty dealings. Suddenly flat broke, Dick and Jane must find a new way to support their lavish lifestyle, and in time they discover just the thing -- crime. A remake of Ted Kotcheff's 1977 hit (which helped re-launch Jane Fonda's screen career), Fun With Dick and Jane also stars Alec Baldwin, John Michael Higgins, and Angie Harmon. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The Bluth family of Orange County, CA, once again forces the media critics to come up with new variations on the word "dysfunction" as the cult-favorite sitcom Arrested Development launches its second season. For those who came in late, straight-arrow Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) is still trying to keep his family and the family business from disintegrating after his entrepreneur father is thrown in jail on a fraud charge. Well, anyway, he was in jail until he broke out with the help of lookalike convict Oscar (also Jeffrey Tambor) at the end of season one. Now that George Sr. is on the run, the authorities target poor Michael for prosecution in their efforts to bring Bluth Inc. to justice -- and thus Michael's older brother, Gob, an habitually unemployed (and woefully) inept magician, becomes head of the family, managing to convince the company's board of directors that he actually has some business sense! In other developments, Michael's kid brother, Buster (Tony Hale), takes a break from his indolence by romancing Lupe (B.W. Gonzalez), a girl he'd met at a charity drive, and by joining the U.S. Army -- conveniently losing a hand in a freak accident just before he is to be sent to Iraq.

Meanwhile, bumbling detective Gene Parmesan (Martin Mull) gets lost somewhere south of the border while searching for the elusive George Sr.; Oscar, the man who'd traded places with George Sr. to effect his escape, may also end up replacing George Sr. in bed with his the elder Bluth's wife, Lucille (Jessica Walter); and Michael's 14-year-old son, George Michael, takes a surrealistic journey into "Charlie Brown" territory when he's dumped by his girlfriend. Plus, Michael's doctor-cum-actor brother-in-law Tobias (David Cross) edges further out of the closet when he adopts the drag alter ego of "Mr. Featherbottom." Also, this is the season when we meet George Sr.'s hated business rival Stan Sitwell (Ed Begley Jr.), whose daughter Sally (Christine Taylor) was once (and may still be) Michael's childhood sweetheart. Other guest performers include Martin Short as the paraplegic, monumentally annoying Uncle Jack Dorso, an old family friend who offers to help the Bluths regain their stock majority in their own company -- at a price; and blind lawyer/congenital liar Maggie Lizer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who shows up pregnant, leading Michael to believe that he's going to be a father again; and Ben Stiller as Gob's magician mentor Tony Wonder, whose most famous illusion was being baked in a loaf of bread -- and who, like everyone else on the show, has an ulterior motive for lending the Bluths a helping hand. The last episode of the season finds George Sr. still on the lam; Tobias linking up with his father-in-law's blackmailing, self-deprecating former secretary Kitty (Patricia Velasquez); and George Michael entering into a relationship with the devoutly Christian Ann Veal (Mae Whitman), despite her total revulsion for his family and everything they stand for. As in season one, Arrested Development earned several Emmy nominations for its second season, winning the prize for Outstanding Writing. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato follow up Party Monster by returning to the documentary form of their most popular film The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Rather than examining evangelists-cum-gay icons, this time the duo takes aim at the cultural phenomenon that is and was Deep Throat, the hardcore porn film that cost 25,000 dollars to make and grossed over 600-million-dollars world-wide, making it the most successful independent film of all time. The impact of the film on the public's perception of pornography is discussed, as is the unlikely relationship the film had to the Watergate scandal. Actress Linda Lovelace who later denounced Deep Throat, claiming she'd been forced to make it at gunpoint, appears in interviews that were shot just before her fatal 2002 car accident. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

H.G. Bissinger's best-selling true-life account of a few months in the life of a high-school football team comes to the screen in this adaptation written and directed by Peter Berg. Odessa, TX, is an oil town in the western part of the state that's home to the Permian High School Panthers, the football team with the best winning record in the state. Odessa is a town with more than its share of problems; the decline of the oil business in Texas has set the city's economy into a tailspin, and racial tensions still erupt into violence on occasion. But football is the one thing that brings all the people of Odessa together, and on Friday nights every fall, as many as 20,000 people fill Permian's football stadium to watch Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) and his boys try to lead the team to victory. As Gaines works to build a winning team in a town where victory is prized above all else, however, his players struggle through the emotional trials common to any teenager and ponder the fact that there is little future in their hometown...and that a championship season can be as much a burden as a triumph. Friday Night Lights also stars Lucas Black, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, and country singer-turned-actor Tim McGraw. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Making its Fox network bow on November 2, 2003, the weekly, half-hour Arrested Development would seem to meet all the qualifications of a "cult favorite." It was smart, hip, and savagely funny; it developed a fiercely loyal circle of fans; it was almost universally beloved of the critical establishment; and it never drew a large audience, barely making a second and then a third season. Jason Bateman headed the cast as Michael Bluth, a thirtysomething widower with a likable 13-year-old son named George Michael (Michael Cera). The level-headed Michael was disdained as the "white sheep" of his highly dysfunctional family because he refused to luxuriate in the wealth accumulated by his business entrepreneur father, George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), who had built a small Newport Beach frozen-banana stand into a vast financial empire. Instead, Michael broke from tradition by actually going to work for a living, and by not giving in to the ostentatious self-indulgence practiced by the rest of the Bluth clan. But when George Sr. was thrown in jail on a charge of fraud, Michael was forced to return to Orange County, CA, to take charge of the family and the family business, both of which were bankrupt because all of his father's assets had been frozen.

Now it was Michael's unenviable task to instill financial responsibility -- not to mention responsibility, period -- in the rest of the Bluth family. These included Michael's snobbish, boozy, hyperjudgmental mother, Lucille (Jessica Walter), who resided in a posh Balboa Bay penthouse and to whom credit cards were life's blood. Also living in Lucille's digs was Michael's youngest brother, Buster (Tony Hale), a perennial graduate student helplessly tied to his mother's apron strings (Buster would later become even more ineffectual, and far more of a thorn in Michael's side, when he lost his hand in an accident and was forced to use an ill-fitting hook). Moving in with Michael until conditions improved (if ever!) were his twin sister, Lindsay (Portia de Rossi), a selfish, scatterbrained liberal activist; Lindsay's husband, Tobias Fünke (David Cross), a former doctor who'd lost his license after administering CPR to a man who didn't need it, and who was half-heartedly trying to break into the acting profession (Tobias was also a deeply closeted homosexual, a fact obvious to everyone but himself); and the couple's spoiled-rotten daughter, Mae, aka "Maeby" (Alia Shawkat), for whom Michael's son, George Michael, harbored a somewhat unnatural crush. And just when you thought that the Bluth family couldn't be any more screwed up, we submit for your approval oldest son George Oscar II, aka "Gob" (Will Arnett), a spectacularly inept stage magician who suffered from a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease and who never had a job -- except when, during Michael's absence in season two, he inexplicably became the darling of Bluth Inc.'s board of directors.

Arrested Development also boasted a large cast of semi-regulars, most prominently Henry Winkler as the Bluth family's lovable but dangerously incompetent lawyer, Barry Zuckerkorn; Liza Minnelli as Lucille Bluth's neighbor and chief social rival Lucille Austero, aka Lucille 2, who at one point entered into a ridiculously torrid romance with the very much younger Buster; Justin Lee as Annyong, a 14-year-old Korean orphan whom Lucille Bluth adopted just to spite Buster; Ed Begley Jr. as George Sr.'s unscrupulous business rival Stan Sitwell; and an unbilled Ron Howard (whose Imagine Entertainment company produced the series) as the series' omnipresent narrator, forever filling in plot gaps with vital information (signature phrase: "In fact...") -- and always several steps ahead of the thick-eared characters. It is virtually impossible to chronicle all of the series' off-the-wall dialogue and surrealistic sight gags; suffice to say that the decision to approach the material in a hand-held "documentary" fashion, and to dispense with the use of a laugh track, only served to emphasize the million and one absurdities. The consistency of the series' lofty quality can be attributed to the fact that its creator, Mitchell Hurwitz (a veteran of such sitcoms as The Golden Girls and The John Larroquette Show), devoted every ounce of his energy to Arrested Development, refusing to accept any other projects throughout the show's run. Arguably too smart for the room, Arrested Development never got the huge audience it deserved, though the devotion of its fans and its multitude of industry awards all but shamed Fox into renewing the series beyond its first and second season. At the risk of offending devotees of Seinfeld and The Honeymooners, there are millions who regard Arrested Development as one of the best comedy series to grace network TV. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

As Arrested Development leaps into its first season, hard-working Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) is on the brink of starting a new life in Arizona with son George Michael (Michael Cera) when he is dragged kicking and screaming back to California, there to take charge of his family's business when his light-fingered father, George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), is jailed for fraud and the company's assets frozen. Though he had fondly assumed he'd seen the last of his vituperrious mother, Lucille (Jessica Walter), and his lazy, self-indulgent siblings, he was forced to hunker down and teach them how to behave (and spend!) more responsibly. As Michael's airheaded would-be-activist twin sister, Lindsay (Portia de Rossi), her sexually confused ex-doctor hubby, Tobias (David Cross), and their out-of-control daughter, Maeby (Alia Shawkat), move in with Michael, older brother Gob (Will Arnett), a spectacularly unsuccessful and untalented magician, must face the prospect of actually getting a real job, while the "baby" of the family, Michael's feckless kid brother, Buster (Tony Hale), remains sequestered in his mommy's Balboa Bay condo. Michael's well-ordered world doesn't take very long to unravel; by the second episode, his darling son George Michael has set fire to the Bluths' frozen-banana stand in Newport Beach, and has developed a borderline-incestuous crush on cousin Maeby. A few weeks later, Lucille Bluth's neurotic social rival Lucille Austero (Liza Minnelli) has entered into an affair with the much, much, much younger Buster, an act that will eventually move Buster's mom to spitefully adopt a Korean orphan named Annyong (Justin Lee). Meanwhile, Michael finds it next to impossible to break up the doomed romance between brother Gob and his girlfriend, Marta (Patricia Velasquez), and to fire such millstones around the Bluths' necks as hopelessly inept family lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn (Henry Winkler) and blackmailing company secretary Kitty Sanchez (Judy Greer).

Among the supporting actors entering into the lunacy are Rocky co-star Carl Weathers, who makes the first of several self-deprecating appearances as himself in the episode wherein George Michael is forced to hire a public relations service to gain entrance to a private school; Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton as the warden in the prison where George Sr. is wasting away, so to speak; Seinfeld veteran Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the sight-challenged attorney Maggie Lizer, who plays up to Michael while trying to dig up more damaging dirt on his family's business practices; and series regular David Cross' longtime Mr. Show cohort Bob Odenkirk as a marriage counselor who tries to patch up the differences between Lindsay and Tobias (chief among them the fact that the "never-nude" Tobias will not undress in front of his spouse); and Amy Poehler, real-life wife of regular Will Arnett, as the "where the hell did she come from?" new wife of the gormless Gob. The season finale finds George Sr. staging a heart attack for the purpose of busting out jail, Maeby finally tumbling to George Michael's unspoken love for her, an unintentionally gay-themed book written years ago by Tobias embarrassingly hitting the best-seller charts, and the rivalry between Buster and Annyong coming to a head -- and threatening to bust both of their heads. Although season one of Arrested Development posted lukewarm ratings, the series earned a renewal from the Fox network largely on the strength of its five surprise Emmy Award wins (Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series, Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing, and Outstanding Writing). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An all-grown-up Alicia Silverstone starred on this lightweight NBC comedy drama series as attorney Kate Fox. A divorce lawyer by day, Kate moonlighted as a matchmaker, finding suitable mates for her recently broken-up clients. Sometimes, Kate's good intentions were nullified by the disastrous results of her Cupidity, but generally things turned out okay. Also in the cast was Ryan O'Neal as Kate's boss -- and father -- ruthless attorney Jerry Fox, and David Conrad as Michael Mendelsohn, who could have been Kate's own Mister Right had she been savvy enough to realize it. Miss Match first aired on September 26, 2003. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Undercover Brother began life as an animated series on the Internet. The satirical cartoon was created by novelist and screenwriter John Ridley (Three Kings) for the website urbanentertainment.com. Ridley wrote the screenplay with Michael McCullers, co-writer of the Austin Powers sequels, and it was directed by Malcolm D. Lee (Spike Lee's cousin, and the writer/director of The Best Man). The film stars Eddie Griffin (of TV's Malcolm and Eddie) as Undercover Brother, he of the gold Cadillac convertible and huge Afro, who uses gadgets and disguises to steal from the rich and give to the poor. His activities are discovered by the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D., a spy organization devoted to subverting The Man (Robert Trumbull) and his henchman, Mr. Feather (Chris Kattan), who use their power over the media to demean black people and destroy racial unity. The spy organization is run by The Chief (Chi McBride), who is constantly screaming at his subordinates. They include Sistah Girl (Aunjanue Ellis), a beautiful martial artist, Conspiracy Brother (Dave Chappelle), who sees white supremacist plots everywhere, and Smart Brother (Gary Anthony Williams, who provided the voice of Undercover Brother in the cartoon), who supplies the operatives with gadgets and information. When a popular black political figure, General Boutwell (Billy Dee Williams), calls a press conference, presumably to announce his presidential candidacy, and instead announces that he's opening a chain of fried chicken restaurants, the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. rightly suspects foul play, and recruits Undercover Brother to look into it. He goes undercover as an uptight buppie to work for The Man, but his cover is soon blown, and the seductive White She Devil (Denise Richards) is sent in to use her feminine wiles to destroy Undercover Brother. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide