An HE friend from Canada bought a copy of the Ishtar Bluray a day or two ago, and has generously offered to snag a copy for yours truly and send it along by mail. Sony Home Video’s recent decision to delay the release date until May or thereabouts was very last-minute and obviously didn’t prevent copies from being shipped.

Nobody knows if Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo, which begins filming this month, will work or not. But it it does it’ll be an emotionally satisfying finale to a real-life, hard-knocks Hollywood drama about a gifted filmmaker who’s riding high and then runs into a career ditch and has to struggle for years to make it back to the top, and loses his marriage along the way. Call it Cameron Crowe.

(l. to r.) We Bought A Zoo costars Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon, director-cowriter Cameron Crowe

It has a better story than Jerry Maguire in some ways — darker, more textured — and much better one than Elizabethtown‘s.

Will We Bought A Zoo (I almost called it Zoo Story) turn things around? I haven’t read the original Aline Brosh Mckenna script or Crowe’s rewrite, but I’m kind of scratching my head at this point. An adaptation of Benjamin Mee’s book sounds, no offense, like a moderately appealing Disney film in which Dean Jones and Hayley Mills might have co-starred in the early ’60s.

Crowe’s Zoo will have a bit more gravitas, I’m presuming. Or at least some angularity. For one thing star Matt Damon (who plays Mee) recently told MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz that it’ll have “a lot of Eddie Vedder and a lot of Neil Young” on the soundtrack. So you have that and then you add a dilapidated zoo, ornery animals, a couple of kids (one of them played by Elle Fanning), zoo staffers, cancer, a girlfriend and a grandma and…well, you tell me. Damon, Fanning, Scarlett Johansson (playing the girlfriend and not the dying wife, right?), Thomas Haden Church, Patrick Fugit, etc.

At the end of the road Zoo might just be just a cool family film or something genuinely touching or (pray this won’t happen) another Elizabethtown. The apparent plan is to open toward the end of the year with a full award-season treatment from 20th Century Fox.

But even if it only half works Zoo will be seen as some kind of directing comeback and a career re-boot for Crowe, who’s been through some stop-and-go times over the last few years. I for one will be happy to see him out of the thicket and back in the saddle.

It’s probably too melodramatic to use a famous John Milton quote — “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light” — to describe Crowe’s career path since ’05. But the former Rolling Stone journalist was clearly basking in auteurist glory after the successes of Jerry Maguire (’96) and Almost Famous (’00).

And then came the sense of shock and total calamity when Crowe crashed into the side of a Kentucky mountain with Elizabethtown (’05), a debacle which also seriously damaged Orlando Bloom‘s career. A combination cutesy romance and career-disaster drama, Elizabethtown wound up earning about $52 million worldwide, and pulled down a Rotten Tomatoes score of 27 hoi-polloi and 19 creme de la creme.

I only know that pre-Elizabethtown Crowe was Mr. Hot Shit…okay, make that Mr. Moderately Hot Shit in the wake of Crowe’s creepily downish Vanilla Sky (’01)…and post-Elizabethtown the word around town was, “Good God, a guy as mature and insightful and gifted as Cameron Crowe wrote and directed this?…what happened?”

That’s what folks on my end were saying, at least.

If you’re any kind of man failure isn’t that big a deal. Fall off a horse, you get right back on…simple. So Crowe didn’t move to the Rocky Mountains and live with the wolves like John Colter. He survived and kept plugging, devoting himself to this and that project and screenplay over the next five-plus years. But for this and that reason nothing quite came together.

And then a new movie — a kind of Jerry Maguire-meets-an-early-version-of- Greenberg-meets-Joe vs. the Volcano-in-Hawaii type deal — almost happened two years ago and then suddenly fizzled out in pre-production, prompting thoughts of Elizabethtown 2.

It was eventually called Deep Tiki, with Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspooon set to costar. It came very close to shooting but then ran over a creative grenade or two and stalled and was more or less abandoned in either December ’08 or January ’09.

It may have been that Crowe said to himself (or one or more of the creative principals said to Crowe), “Wait, wait, wait…hold up. What are we doing here? Spy satellites, an erupting volcano, a sacrifice to Hawaiian Gods?”

I’m trying to think of the last time that a major-league auteur had secured financing and cast two movie stars and had done all the spade work and lined up most of the ducks and then…wait, huddle, stall. Definitely weird.

There’s also Crowe’s Marvin Gaye biopic that Variety‘s Steve Chagollan wrote about on 4.1.10. “Crowe has been working very quietly for three and a half years to align the key elements on a pic about Motown singer Marvin Gaye,” he reported. “Despite securing extensive music rights and the full cooperation of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr., the project, with Scott Rudin attached as producer, is being reconceived until Crowe and Sony can come to terms on a budget and a star (Will Smith, who has an ongoing relationship with Sony, declined the part after much discussion).”

A couple of days ago I wrote Crowe about some information that came my way about his having written a screenplay based on David Sheff‘s “Beautiful Boy” and Nic Sheff‘s “Tweak,” which both tell the same story about Nic’s methedrine addiction.

The source told me that David “didn’t like the way he was portrayed, so now the production company — Brad Pitt‘s Plan B Entertainment — has moved on to another screenwriter.” A friend who did some checking says the project is legit but isn’t sure about my source’s account. In the thick of We Bought A Zoo or whatever Crowe didn’t respond.

And then last September came the news that Crowe’s musician wife Nancy Wilson, citing irreconcilable differences, had filed for divorce, and that the couple had been separated since the summer of ’08. I don’t get into personal stuff, but one naturally suspects that the whole pressure-of-things-not-panning-out-all-that-well may have been a factor.

In any case, Crowe is clearly due for a little light shining down, a clearing in the woods. As a guy who once heard the roar of the crowd and held mountains in the palm of his hand, he needs to stand on a plateau and feel the kind of serenity and satisfaction that can only come from making a film that people admire and pay to see in great numbers.

Speaking as an ex-Crowe homie who personally likes and admires the guy, I’m pulling for him and We Bought A Zoo and the whole third-act payoff that will (or could or should) make Cameron Crowe a winner.

I’ve never had a fat cat in my life, but the size of Mouse, my borderline obese two and a half year-old Siamese male, has become a problem. 25 minutes ago, I mean. He just jumped onto the top of the wooden cabinet above the sink, filled with plates and glasses with two suitcases sitting on top, and the cabinet couldn’t take the weight and the whole thing just came CRASHING DOWN on the counter and the floor.

Mouse — Friday, 1.7, 1:05 pm.

It sounded like a series of grenades going off, like the building itself was collapsing. The noise must have startled people walking on the street. The cabinet shattered in sections, smashed plates, smashed glasses, smashed bottles, clutter & crap and liquor stink all over the place. The kitchen is a complete disaster zone, and all because Mouse is Orson Welles. Now I’m looking at $300 or $400 in reconstruction costs to put it back up, replace the plates and glasses…at least.

Snow all day today, tonight and into tomorrow. Nothing heavy, and yet New York City sanitation crews are still behind on the last snowfall. Ten-foot-tall mountains of garbage were sitting in various locales on the Lower East Side as I was roaming around last night. If I was Mayor Bloomberg I would have done more than demote sanitation chiefs who allegedly ordered a deliberate snowplow slowdown because they were angry about cutbacks. I would have gone all Luca Brasi on their asses.

I allowed in this morning’s Season of the Witch review that the Rotten Tomatoes rating “might go up a tad when the kneejerk fanboys start weighing in.” But they didn’t. With no support from anyone, Dominic Sena‘s medieval calamity currently has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes ratings ever.

Ben Zuk‘s “Salute to Cinema” is just another flashy collage of scene slivers. Not a hint of content or feeling or theme interrupts the nonstop so-whattitude — combustion, verve, sound and fury…roller-coaster! And it doesn’t hold a candle to Matthew Seitz’s recent assemblage. Pay a little less attention to the 4th of July sparkler aspects and a little more to what the films were actually about.

I got started late today because of a nightmare that woke me at 3:15 am. It was an okay flying dream (i.e., didn’t feel like a nightmare at first) in which I was parachuting in a kind of sideways fashion, not dropping as much as coasting along three or four hundred feet above a half-suburban, half-wooded area. A run-of-the-mill metaphor for a high-wire act like writing a daily Hollywood column that’s half movies and half mood-pocket. That plus the idea of being more at peace in the air than on the ground. No biggie.

I suddenly felt like I didn’t want to coast along anymore so I steered the chute toward the flat roof of an unusually tall Victorian-era home. I grabbed hold of something or other and landed on the roof. The chute naturally deflated. I walked over and tried to open the trap door on the roof but it was bolted shut. Then I suddenly lost my footing (the chute tugged or suddenly half inflated due to a wind gust) and I fell off the roof. No chance that the chute would open as I plummeted head first. I was a second or two from landing and breaking my neck so I woke up with a “whuh!…no!” Yes, just like every actor who wakes up from a bad dream in every movie that’s tried to thrill or scare or spook, going back to Vertigo.

Sleeping was out so I got up and read and wrote “Boiled Down,” and then I began to feel overwhelming fatigue around 6:45 am and dropped off on the couch, and then woke up around 11:45 am, and all because of a simple flash of a thought about falling (or failing) that manifested in a standard boilerplate flying dream, which I’ve been having since I was eight and which are basically a dime a dozen.

And it’s called being interested in owning just one of these Bluray discs — the darker one directed by that Kershner guy — and ignoring the hell out of the other five. I could see Netflxing A New Hope, but Return of the Jedi has been erased from my memory. Don’t even mention the prequels.

The screening selections at Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.27 — 2.6) are always well chosen, but the meat and the heat are always the tributes and panels. Because these events are always so smoothly produced and frankly kind of Deja Vu-like, some of us are hoping to again sample some of the delightful chaos that punctuated last year’s James Cameron tribute.

Here’s the final big-name roster: (a) Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) receiving The American Riviera Award, and interviewed by Durling on Friday, 1.28 at the Arlington Theatre; (b) James Franco (127 Hours) getting the Outstanding Performance of the Year Award, and interviewed by Leonard Maltin on Saturday, 1.29 at the Arlington; (c) Christopher Nolan (Inception) being given the Modern Master Award, and interviewed by Deadline.com’s Pete Hammond on Sunday, 1.30 at the Arlington; and Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech) receiving the Montecito Award, again with Hammond interviewing on Monday, 1.31 at the Arlington. And then five nights later, on Saturday, 2.5, Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole) will be handed the Cinema Vanguard Award at the Arlington with Durling moderating.

The 2011 Virtuosos Awards, presented at the Lobero theatre on Friday, 2.4, will go to Lesley Manville (Another Year), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) with Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger on the mike.

The annual “It Starts With The Script” panel, which is always moderated at the Lobero theatre by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, will happen on Saturday, 1.29 at 11 am. Three hours later marketing whiz and “job whisperer” Madelyn Hammond will moderate the “Creative Forces: Women in the Biz” panel at the same venue. L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein will moderate the usual “Movers & Shakers” panel on Sunday, 1.30 at 11 am, also at the Lobero. Six days — Saturday, February 5 — the “Directors on Directing” pane will kick off at 11 am with EW‘s Dave Karger moderating.