Sometimes a fine director comes up with a clunker - like Downsizing

Every once in a while a great artist/writer/director comes up w/ a terrible clunker that should probably just be erased from his or her collected works - and it usually happens at mid or late career when the artist should be in top form. This probably occurs in late life because, first, nobody would have backed/published the project if it were pitched by an unknown and, second, the artist has reached a stage where nobody will second-guess, everyone in the production assumes the artist knows best and this will be another work of genius or at least a commercial success. So after the excellent Nebraska and a string of really good adaptations of generally little-known novels (I have to admit that I'd always hoped he would read Exiles), Alexander Payne comes up with a stinker that one can only wish had been killed in the bud: Downsizing. The premise: A team of Norwegian scientists has come up w/ a process of shrinking humans down to the size of a small bird, and this - if only everyone would go through the simple process! - will save our wasteful planet and species. The absurdity of this is almost beyond discussion, but let's stay w/ it for a while. A small % of people around the world agree, and after the medical procedure they live in tiny communities of "little people." One such little person is Matt Damon, with the problem that he and his wife (Kristin Wiig) agree to downsize and live in "Leisureworld," but she freaks out during the medical process and leaves him alone, in fact she leaves the movie altogether at that point. At least someone got out! The movie is not only devoid of any credible plot or story line, it's also not even funny or frightening - as is, to cite the most famous of parallels, part 2 of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, q.v. By the end, Damon has come to the startling realization that even in Leisureworld (which looks and is meant to look much like an expensive retirements community or perhaps time share) there lives a subculture of workers and manual laborers (cooks, cleaning crews, etc.) who make the life of leisure possible for others. About the only appealing person in the movie is a Vietnamese worker played by Hong Chou - although I suspect Asian-Americans may find her broken-English dialog to be culturally obtuse. Joining forces w/ her, Damon first travels to Norway where the original scientists are planning some weird underground community that will survive an expected methane leak that will wipe out human life; they decline to join, and who can blame them? If the future holds more movies like this, bring on the methane!