10 Exact Moments Awesome Movie Directors Stopped Trying

The first decade of Cameron Crowe's career was consistently respectable, releasing the acclaimed likes of Say Anything..., Singles, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous, the latter of which won Crowe a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Hell, even Vanilla Sky was at least an interesting movie in all of its flawed ambition, even if his 2005 romantic drama Elizabethtown seemed to signal a filmmaker getting far too wrapped up in his own penchant for earnest melodrama.

But that was nothing compared to his 2011 family dramedy We Bought A Zoo, a film so overwhelming in its gooey-centered sappiness as to be genuinely grating to sit through.

This is best exemplified by the film's cringe-worthy ending, in which protagonist and aforementioned zoo purchaser Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) witnesses a vision of his dead wife (Stéphanie Szostak), and upon asking her why she'd ever talk to someone like him, she smiles and replies, "Why not?"

It's at this point that it became clear Crowe had nothing new to offer audiences beyond lazy, trite sentiment, and his only movie since, the infamously reviled Aloha, didn't suggest he'd gone about toning things down at all.

The honest, earned emotion of Crowe's earlier and better films just feels entirely absent in his more superficial and cloying recent efforts.