Downsizing (2017)

I was eager to see this story of humans who shrink themselves to live in a community more sustainable than our current society but its mad mood swings from comedy to drama are a bit hard to take. Matt Damon (last blogged for Suburbicon) does his darndest as our hero Paul and Christoph Waltz (most recently in The Legend of Tarzan) is pretty funny as the hedonistic Dusan (DUE-shan). The first trailer we saw for this featured Kristen Wiig (last in Ghostbusters) as Paul's wife Audrey but we guessed, even before the second trailer confirmed it, that she wouldn't "downsize" with Paul. Hong Chau (no newcomer, she's been in several projects, including Inherent Vice and all but one episode of Big Little Lies season 1) has been nominated for three Best Supporting Actress awards already (here's the running list), but, frankly, her character of Ngoc Lan bugged me--shrill, bossy, and no fun. Fun fact, the voice on the phone who says "Do you think moss is pretty?" is Mary Kay Place.

Director/co-writer Alexander Payne was Oscar-nominated for directing his last movie Nebraska, very clearly a dramedy (he's had three other Oscar nominations and two wins), so we expected more. There's a lot there but it lacks cohesion. Nor can we solely blame co-writer Jim Taylor, who shared one win (for Sideways (2004) and two of the nominations (for co-writing Election (1999) and producing The Descendants), and also co-wrote Citizen Ruth (1996), About Schmidt (2002), and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007), all with Payne, among Taylor's credits.

The original music by Rolfe Kent (scored Labor Day) can be streamed on spotify. That link doesn't include the 40 some songs played throughout the movie. One song egregiously missing from the final cut is Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime, so humorously placed in all trailers.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are lukewarm at best, averaging 51%, while its audiences, averaging 25%, were represented by the folks at our screening last week, who were antsy and talkative every time the laughs died down.

Another milestone! In early November I celebrated the 1000th movie posted on the blog. That number included posts summarizing nineteen movies that I saw before I began writing on September 3, 2008. This movie, which we saw on December 23, 2017, marks 1000 movies actually seen in about 485 weeks (3393 days, but who's counting?). I keep track of the numbers on my alphabetical index. Thanks for reading!