Remember the days when Cameron Crowe was the eloquent hip guy, the cool guy, the ex-Rolling Stone reporter and smoothly accomplished, musically-driven director-screenwriter who made smart, rich, soulful movies (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Say Anything) that the vast majority of elite critics used to embrace with the exception of Vanilla Sky, of course, and before the absolute meltdown calamity of Elizabethtown?

I’m asking this because today’s announcement about the Thanksgiving sneak of We Bought A Zoo signifies that he’s now in league with the goody-two-shoes PG family crowd. This is a guy who used to hang out with degenerate rock bands on the Sunset Strip in the ’70s. This is a former boy genius who articulated to the world how cool it was to be “uncool,” and who reminded all journalists the value of being honest and unmerciful. What happened to his hip cred? What would Lester Bangs say?