Videogum Joins The New Yorker In Breaking The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Movie Review Embargo

Gabe — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:45:25 +0000

New Yorker film critic David Denby has created quite the dull and unimportant controversy this week by publishing his review of David Fincher’s new movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a full week before he was supposed to publishing it according to the embargo that he agreed to before attending a screeninzzzzzzzzzzzz. Fascinating stuff! The movie’s producer, Scott Rudin, is, in the words of the Dipset Crew, “mad.” Here was Denby’s defense of his actions (via Movieline):

The system is destructive: Grown-ups are ignored for much of the year, cast out like downsized workers, and then given eight good movies all at once in the last five weeks of the year. A magazine like The New Yorker has to cope as best as it can with a nutty release schedule. It was not my intention to break the embargo, and I never would have done it with a negative review.

[T]he early [NYFCC] vote forced the early screening of Dragon Tattoo. So we had a dilemma: What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not We Bought the Zoo, or whatever it’s called. If we held everything serious, we would be coming out on Christmas-season movies until mid-January. We had to get something serious in the magazine. So reluctantly, we went early with Dragon, which I called “mesmerizing.” I apologize for the breach of the embargo. It won’t happen again. But this was a special case brought on by year-end madness.

We bought a ZING! To which Rudin responded:

Everything I Need To Know I Never Learned Because My Father Wanted To Write A Memoir

Gabe — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:11:52 +0000

There’s a new memoir by David Gilmour coming out called The Film Club in which he allows his son to drop out of high school as long as he agrees to be home schooled by Gilmour, with the curriculum of watching three films a week. Whoops. You should probably name your memoir Tuesdays With The Worst Father. Of course, each of them rediscover the true meaning of the father-son bond, and that it’s a dude in the Crying Game, but I’m most looking forward to the sequel in which the son works at a gas station and the mom is really mad that she ever married David Gilmour. Also, if I remember high school correctly, there are enough lazy teachers that we probably watched more than three movies a week. Just saying.

Admittedly, I have not read it. Maybe it’s so good. But I also didn’t read David Denby’s memoir, and that details his rapid decline into full-on porn addiction following a bitter divorce and some crushing stock market losses, so if I had to choose just one professional film critic’s memoir about terrible decision making to read this year, it’s Team Denby.

(Find out more about The Film Club at Very Short List.)

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Videogum Joins The New Yorker In Breaking The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Movie Review Embargo

Everything I Need To Know I Never Learned Because My Father Wanted To Write A Memoir