Matt Damon and Cameron Crowe React to New Yorker ‘Zoo’ Diss

New Yorker critic David Denby didn’t just piss off Sony and David Fincher with that embargo-breaking ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ review. He also managed to ruffle Cameron Crowe and Matt Damon’s feathers in his dismissive explanation about why he wanted to feature ‘Dragon Tattoo,’ over, say, Crowe’s new movie, ‘We Bought a Zoo.’ “What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not ‘We Bought the Zoo,’ or whatever it’s called,” Denby told Scott Rudin in a now-famous e-mail exchange. Now Crowe and Damon have reacted to the diss and managed to live up to their reputation for being some of the nicest guys in Hollywood.

Crowe told the Washington Post, “He should see the movie. I’m actually anxious for him to see the movie. … It’s a time filled with cynicism, and there’s a lot of movies about that, and this one is a little bit about hope and a lack of cynicism.”

Damon, meanwhile, hadn’t even heard of the dust-up, but weighed in with, “I think it’s probably more difficult to be non-cynical and be a critic. I think it probably takes more guts for a critic to admit that this movie gets to them than it will for them to bash it, you know.” He added, non-cynically, that Crowe’s opus ‘Jerry Maguire’ still makes him cry. “[It’s] perfect because I have that cathartic experience, and I don’t feel cheap afterwards, you know?” he said of the Tom Cruise vehicle.

Crowe summed up the whole incident thusly: “The Denby thing was almost funny to me because 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. … Those two were tangling, and that was a private e-mail, and it was fun to happily watch from afar.”

So, no hard feelings from the ‘Zoo’ crew.

[via the Washington Post]

[Photos: WireImage/Getty]