David Denby damn-well should have honored his agreement, but his excuse is 100% accurate and should start a conversation about 'awards-bait' scheduling.

As most of you know, the blogosphere caught on fire yesterday when it was reported that David Denby, film critic for The New Yorker, would be running a review of Sony's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in today's issue of the magazine, which would publish eight days ahead of the official December 13th embargo.  Long story short, the New York Film Critics Circle were shown the film early and ahead of everyone else after they arbitrarily decided to move up their voting dates for their annual awards, mostly in order to be FIRST in the parade of year-end awards.  Despite promising to respect the embargo, Denby has gone ahead and published the first review.  I won't link to it, but (slight digression) I will say that it's almost as short as this paragraph and he might-as-well have been reviewing the eight-minute trailer.  Sony executive Scott Rudin directly confronted Mr. Denby, which started a back-and-forth email thread which climaxed with Denby being banned from future Sony screenings for the immediate (?) future.  Good.