Variety
reports that Matt Damon is in the final
stages of negotiation to join Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo,
based on a memoir of the same name by Benjamin Mee.

This
is not a film that gets my heart racing, despite my long-held love for
Crowe. In the true story, Mee’s wife is dying of cancer and he ends up
buying a broken down wildlife park in England, replete with 200 animals.
In the movie it seems like Mee’s wife is dead right from the start
(ooh, all the better to have a foxy local lady help him heal his
heart!), but the zoo shit – and all the lessons Mee and his kids learn –
stay intact.

It sounds like the sappiest sort of
sentimental shit, and I can’t tell what Damon coming on board means.
Does it mean the script is better than the concept, or does it mean that
after Green
Zone and
The
Informant! Damon would like a hit? I’ll try to
keep my mind open, but Cameron Crowe doesn’t need to follow up the
misfire of Elizabethtown with something this treacly.