Mo is no Mo'

The Mighty seemed to have fallen in December 2009. The release of Zhang "Yimo's" latest picture has caused a serious wave of Mo trashing on the Internet. As one netizen put it on Sina's twitter: "Mo is no Mo'."

I must say, it is fun to watch the mighty fall, and I have done my fair share of twittering on the subject as well. The truth is, no one wanted to say anything bad about him for 18 months; after all, he is the Chinese creative wunderkind who dazzled the world with the Olympic Opening Ceremony. The nation rallied behind him and he delivered, the show was amazing, and everyone - I mean just everyone - was terribly pleased.

So what went wrong with Mo's latest film? On the surface: Nothing. It should have been another crowd pleaser. The script is an adaptation of the Coen Brothers' 1984 film Blood Simple, Mo and his producer paid good money for the rights of the re-make. This action alone should have pleased the more intellectual critics of the director; the fact that he did the right thing in terms of copyright, and picked a script by the Coen Brothers, definitely Hollywood's less commercial strand of creative power.