Crazy Stone

The new narration of Chongqing dialect, the classic lines with black humor style, the unique narrative skills of ring and ring, the absurd and logical plot, as well as the montage technique, timely Peking Opera and other music, constitute the crazy stone directed by Ning Hao

From plot to transition, from angle of lens to rhythmic montage, from editing to tone, from contrast to freeze frame..., you can get the impression involving Guy Ritchie, who may be referred as the Godfather of Film Noir. This story starts with a priceless emerald, a squad of slack guards and two gangs of thieves, one of which is amateur, while the other is professional judging from the looking. It is not difficult to speculate what would happen from this kind of stereotyped beginning. We can't tell which part is the imitation and which is the original. It's a concise and smart comedy, somehow, whose genre is quite different from traditional dramas we can watch at the Chinese cinema. Anyway, for the director, we can say, it's almost an perfect homework. It would make somebody laugh, but it is difficult to have the audience impressed as a milestone movie.

The whole film opens with a close-up of the face of the hero, bao shihong. The lens slowly changes from black and white to color. At the same time, bao shihong appears in the eyes of the audience with an indescribably facial expression.

The popularity of this movie in China is quite logical: black comedies to the extent that this movie has gone are still a novelty and it is quite well done. If the movie makers have been inspired by only one "foreign" movie, it would probably be "Lock, stock and two smoking barrels", as someone has already mentioned. But of course they have seen a lot more, many of which have been reflected in this movie, as intentional parodies or otherwise.

"Crazy stone" has a somewhat convoluted plot, which is not necessarily hopelessly complicated. All it requires is a little attention. Filming technique and editing is not as avant-garde as some of the classic which have become familiar by now – Pulp Fiction, Memento, Amores perros, 21 Grams, just to name a few. There are just enough sleight-of-hand montages to keep it interesting. So does the proliferation of characters – a least a dozen, in four or five "interest groups". Dickens' type caricature or more flesh-and-blood, they are all well acted.

Together with my recommendation, I would like to mention one interesting thing that captured my attention – filmmakers shooting a movie in Chongqing seem to be fond of showcasing the cable car across Chang Jiang (Long River). Saw one recently in another quality Chinese movie, "Sheng huo xiu".

Just when i gave up on Chinese movies, there came the Crazy Stone. It brought me so much fun and made me to regain the hope for the Chinese movies. Never would I consider any liberal and entertaining stuff, such as the Crazy Stone, coming out nowadays from a social context that was tightly controlled, like the Chinese political environment.With a brand new vision the young and open minded director Hao Ning, again, showed us his talents of convincing over people's pockets and their hearts. The director, simply like anyone else, sees the craziness in today's China and has the urge to express his and also everybody else's bewilderness, coz everybody is so lost in front of the money. people do not know where they are and where to go , more crazily, they do not have the rights and power to know about it, so why do not people just make fun of the whole madness, isn't it what China all about now, chaos and craziness... ...