Directed by Hao Ning
Produced by Shihong Bao
Written by Hao Ning
Zhang Cheng
Music by Funky Sueyoshi
Editing by Yuan Du
Release date(s) June 30, 2006
Running time 98 min.
Budget $400,000
Crazy Stone (疯狂的石头) is a 2006 Chinese film directed by Hao Ning. It is notable due to its immense popularity compared to its low budget shooting, as well as its lack of famous actors.
Crazy Stone revolves around three men who want to steal a precious jade stone, and a dedicated/desperate security guard who wants to stop them. However, there are actually two jade stones - the real one, and a fake. The three men end up accidentally returning the real jade and make every effort to steal the fake stone.
Crazy Stone is unique in that the entire movie is spoken in various dialects, such as the Chongqing dialect and Hong Kong idioms. Also, there are many language-specific jokes relating to Chinese. For example, after the security guard bump into a BMW, the angry owner shouts that his car is a "Bie Mo Wo" (Chinese for "Don't touch me"), a deliberate misuse of the actual acronym.
The scene in which a black suited thief tries to steal the jade descending from the ceiling is a subtle reference to Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible movie.[1] and the last scene in which the security guard Bao Shihong fights the thief Mike in the elevator is a subtle reference to the ending of the famous chinese movie Infernal Affairs, where Yan is killed in the elevator.
Name of the leader of 3-gang is 道哥 (Dao4 Ge2, means Brother Tao), which pronounces "dog" in English. Though he threatens his pet dog of putting it into microwave oven, he in fact loves it very much. The gangs pretend to be house mover when actually stealing furniture. House-moving is a nortorious breaking-into and stealing pattern in China.
While trying stealing, the 3-gang has managed to play "pull tab" cheat on bus. This infamous cheating pattern had existed in China for years: one gang member pretends to be an ignorant farmer whose coke can pull tab is printed with huge lucky-draw winning info; many other gang members pretend to be passengers bidding to offer high-price to buy the pull tab; innocent passengers are excited to join the bidding, they believe they can still make profit by buy a $5,000-winning pull tab for only $3,000. When a final passenger gives out his/her thousands dollar of cash, he/she has no idea that he/she gets merely a useless fake aluminum pull tab. In this movie, the 3-gang thought this cheat is still valid, but nowadays this game is so notorious that everyone moves away to the end of bus immediately when the "farmer" says he wins coke luck-draw. The only women who didn't move her seat turned out to be a hearing-disabled one who didn't hear what the gang was saying.
