CAMERON CROWE: AN INNOCENT BYSTANDER IN EMBARGO FEUD

Director Cameron Crowe, who once earned his livelihood as a journalist — when he was a teenaged writer for Rolling Stone, his celebrity interviews were a regular feature of the magazine — and who still occasionally writes for the print media, doesn’t know what to make of New Yorker critic David Denby’s defense for breaking producer Scott Rudin’s embargo on reviewing Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Denby said that he had done so because “We had a dilemma: What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not We Bought the Zoo or whatever it’s called.” Crowe, who directed (but didn’t write) We Bought a Zoo, which stars Matt Damon, told Washington Post columnist Jen Chaney, that while he sympathizes with Denby’s dilemma (“I am still a journalist. … I know what the life of the critic is, and I get it”), he feels as if his film has been bashed for no good reason at all. “I felt like we were the people sitting at a table at the bar and this barroom brawl breaks out and they spill onto your table and you get knocked out. So I’m like, hey man, I’m just having a sandwich here and Scott Rudin and David Denby just came twirling across and I got my jaw broken.” Actually, Crowe suggests that he wishes Denby had reviewed his movie, since he might have discovered that it was not the kind of film he had surmised it to be. “There are so many movies in the holiday season, and it’s so easy to make quick choices based on a lack of information. And he should see the movie.”