A CHRISTMAS CAROL Tops Box Office; THIS IS IT in 2nd Spot

As expected, Walt Disney’s A Christmas Carol took the No. 1 spot at the North American box office this weekend with a solid $31 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Starring Jim Carrey (above), the Robert Zemeckis-directed 3D motion-capture adventure tale based on Charles Dickens’ classic opened at 3,683 locations and scored an average of $8,417 per theater, enough to crush its competition.

At No. 2, Michael Jackson’s This Is It delivered another strong performance, earning $14 million at 3,481 locations. Sony’s documentary about the late pop star’s planned concert series lifted its total gross to an impressive $57.8 million.

New entry The Men Who Stare at [...]

The DGA vs. the Academy: 1980s

Bob Hoskins, Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (top); Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ (bottom)

The DGA vs. the Academy: 1970s
1980
DGA: Michael Apted for Coal Miner’s Daughter
AMPAS: Roman Polanski for Tess
 
1982
DGA: Taylor Hackford for An Officer and a Gentleman
AMPAS: Sidney Lumet for The Verdict
 
1983
DGA: Lawrence Kasdan for The Big Chill and Philip Kaufman for The Right Stuff
AMPAS: Mike Nichols for Silkwood and Peter Yates for The Dresser
 
1984
DGA: Norman Jewison for A Soldier’s Story
AMPAS: Woody Allen for Broadway Danny Rose
 
1985
DGA: Steven Spielberg for The Color Purple and Ron Howard for Cocoon
AMPAS: Akira Kurosawa for Ran and Hector Babenco for Kiss of the Spider Woman
 
1986
DGA: Randa Haines for Children of a Lesser God [...]

CAST AWAY – Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt

Cast Away (2000)
Direction: Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay: William Broyles Jr.
Cast: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt, Lari White
 

 

Many will see Cast Away as a celebration of the triumph of the human spirit. Others will prefer the more mundane explanation that the film merely depicts a man following his animal survival instincts, which propel him to remain alive almost against his will. Whichever way one chooses to view the survival of Tom Hanks‘ Federal Express engineer Chuck Noland (No-land, get it?) after being stranded for years on a desert island (mostly shot in Monuriki, Fiji), Cast Away is little more than an elaborate star vehicle disguised as an existential adventure film. Indeed, this Robert Zemeckis production offers little depth in its presentation of [...]