In any case, she went on to co-star with Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and continued to work, but she was apparently troubled in various ways and it affected the rest of her career. Via David Hudson at MUBI, which as usual has a lot more on Schneider’s legacy, I was just reminded of her walking out of Luis Bunuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire,” which sparked something of a creative coup when the great surrealist decided to replace her with two actresses.

Below is a clip from “Last Tango,” it’s somewhat NSFW, but not as much as you might expect. Considering her feelings about being naked in the film, I considered not using it, but the nudity is not explicit at all here and her acting here with Brando is just too lovely not to use. Also, I couldn’t find any other embeddable scenes. I’m not the biggest fan of “Last Tango,” but I’m sorry she couldn’t take more pride in her terrific performance in it.

As I recounted prior to the start of the long Christmas holiday frame last Tuesday, the oracles of the box office were predicting a reaction to “Little Fockers” somewhat in line with the 2004 performance of “Meet the Fockers.” Specifically, the numbers being bandied about were in the $60 or $70 million range for the entire five day period. The total gross instead appears to be roughly $48.3 million for Universal. That is only a couple of million higher than what “Meet the Fockers” earned over a three day period on its Christmas opening in 2004. Remember, movie ticket prices have gone up a few bucks since ’04.

Nikki Finke recounts how the megastar-laden film’s difficult and expensive $100 million production, helmed by the currently luck-challenged Chris Weitz, provided a windfall for Dustin Hoffman and, I understand, allowed him to almost literally phone-in large portions of his performance. Finke estimates that the lastest “Fockers” movie is earning only about 75% of what the prior comedy made. As for the critics, while “Meet the Fockers” left critics unhappy — as opposed to the very well reviewed original smash-hit, “Meet the Parents” — it was a regular success d’estime compared to the woeful reviews of the third film in what critics are praying will remain a trilogy. Strangely enough, this seems to correlate with diminishing returns for the series.

Overall, things weren’t any better, with Sony’s two expensive, poorly reviewed, star-laden turkeys  — “How Do You Know” and “The Tourist — being slaughtered in their second and third weeks, respectively. (To be fair, since it stars literally the two most famous people in the world right now not named “Obama” or “Oprah” or “Palin” or “Assange,” “The Tourist” is doing significantly better than the latest from James Brooks, but both films are money losers right now.) The extremely un-promising and critically derided “Gulliver’s Travels” was all but thrown to the wolves by Fox and its release was delayed until Friday. It opened in 7th place for the weekend with a Lilliputian estimate of $7.2 million.

Anne Thompson notes that this three-day weekend at the movies was 44% lower than last year, and had some choice words on the drop:

Little Fockers repped the widest-appeal offering among the weakest bunch of holiday releases in recent memory. At a time when studios usually try to maximize returns on their strongest pictures, they instead offered audiences a menu of costly, tame, MOR fare—and moviegoers stayed away in droves.

On the other hand, there was good news this Xmas weekend for movies deemed nice by critics. The critically beloved western from the critically beloved Coen Brothers, “True Grit,” was the weekend’s #2 film. An opening weekend personal best for the distinctive Joel and Ethan C., it earned roughly $38.8 million for Paramount over the five day period (it’s weekend estimate is healthy $25.6 million) while costing $62 million less that “Fockers.” Moreover the money is said to be “up on the screen” as the film is wowing viewers with Director of Photography Roger Deakins’ visuals. It also provides audiences with two high grade superstars (Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon) and even creates a potential new one in young Hailee Steinfeld. If you’re over 40, you might remember a time when film producers often saved money by creating new stars instead of trying to hide their mistakes behind established ones.

Also, contrary to the questionable conventional wisdom that young people have an inborn dislike of westerns (how can they dislike something they’ve never seen?), “True Grit” actually scored slightly better among younger viewers on Cinemascore. Especially considering inevitable Oscar nominations and the way all Coen films have of lingering in the public consciousness, the long-term prospects for big-time legs and Blu-Ray/DVD sales seems extremely bright here. Can’t wait to see this one.

There was also good news this week overall for limited release films like Sylvain Chomet’s animated “The Illusionist” and more so for Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” — getting decent reviews but also suffering some very pronounced critical backlash for the Michelangelo Antonioni-influenced younger Coppola.

Breaking out of the limited release ghetto to some degree, the critical darling and Oscar favorite from director Tom Hooper, “The King’s Speech,” did just fine, earning  an estimate of over $4.5 million in only 700 theaters. It came in at 11th place nationwide, just ahead of — wait for it, “How Do You Know” — which managed to eek out about $3.5 million in 2,483 theaters. Behold the power of Rotten Tomatoes.

“I enjoy movies when they’re sincere, from personal experience. Fosse got away with his girlfriend playing his girlfriend. It’s not an all-romanticized idea of himself. It’s honest.”

True enough. Watching the trailer for “Somewhere,” about a hard living actor (Stephen Dorff) and his tween-age daughter (Elle Fanning), it looks to me like she’s still thinking about a key sliver of that film, but I ‘ll get to that some other time. Also, considering that Coppola is about to become a mom for the second time, it’s a topic that likely hits close to home. I’m hopeful about this one.

Richard Schickel, however, is a more complicated case. Also a strong documentary filmmaker who mainly covers filmmakers of the classic era and his favorite contemporary director, Clint Eastwood, as well as a highly readable writer, I’ve nevertheless have always felt somewhat suspicious of him going back to his eighties reviews in Time Magazine. Those feelings crystallized to some extent when I heard him and critic Emanuel Levy take to task a rabbi on Los Angeles public radio while discussing Robert Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful.” They all but called him a bad Jew for not finding the film offensive and daring to admit he was moved by it, or at least that’s how I remember it.

Still, I’ve enjoyed not only several of his cinephile-friendly documentaries, but also some really good audio commentaries recently featuring Schickel discussing another one of his — and my — favorites, Howard Hawks. I’ve been in a forgiving mood.

Then, however, some editor at the L.A. Times had a very bad idea last week. I guess there’s no law that says, say, that if someone hates Picasso or Oscar Wilde or whomever, they should not review a new biography of them.  Ideally, I suppose, by itself that should not be a deal-breaker — as long as the writer in question can step away from their dislike of the subject enough to actually review the book rather than simply yell to the heavens that the revered creator being chronicled is wildly overrated while slipping in some snide remarks at the author’s expense for daring to think her subject is worth composing an entire book about.

Schickel, however, is clearly not big enough to do that, as he proved in writing this anti-Robert Altman screed disguised as a book review for the Los Angeles Times.  You can read Anne Thompson‘s take and then Patrick Goldstein‘s critique and defense of Altman, which also includes a letter from Altman’s one-time protegee, Alan Rudolph, a pretty strong and prolific filmmaker in his own right.

Again, there’s no law that says a critic cannot despise the output of a director widely seen as a great master. I happen to really and truly hate the three or four films I’ve managed to sit through by Michelangelo Antonioni, yet I know a lot of great critics and filmmakers have had their lives changed by his work. Even if we disagree, a certain amount of respect is due to all those people who are just as smart or smarter than me but who simply see something I don’t. At minimum, then, Altman’s many admirers deserve at least the respect of writing a proper book review.

Also, if you’re going to claim that you’re not disliking him simply for having a loose filmmaking style, citing such top-ranking classical formalists as Bergman and Renoir won’t get you very far. I’d like to know if Schickel has any respect for the more improvisational and experimental French, Italian, and English New Wave directors and neorealists (not my favorite style, by the way) who obviously influenced Altman far more.

As for me, I don’t see the relevance of whether or not Altman was constantly using alcohol and pot. Apparently, Winston Churchill was forever nursing a brandy, which allowed the possible ADHD sufferer to concentrate enough to fight Hitler and save Western Civilization. Whether or not Altman actually had a drug problem or was self-medicating is not for us to know or even care — whatever he was doing, he lived to eighty-one despite serious illnesses and made 45 films starting when he was about 45 with “M*A*S*H” (he’d made films previously, but he was primarily a television director before that), several of them regarded as masterpieces and a number of hits that also happened to be really good movies, and some really good movies that weren’t hits. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, let’s find out what he was having and ship a case/pound of it to all our directors.

***

And now, two movie moments from probably my two favorite Altman films, Nashville and The Long Goodbye. Coincidentally, they both feature stand-out work from, among others, two  performers who became known via “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” specifically Lily Tomlin in maybe my favorite scene in any film of the 1970s, and the late Henry Gibson.