CRAZY RACER (China, 2009)
Directed by: Ning Hao
Starring: Huang Bo, Jiu Kong, Jack Gao, Worapoj Thuantanon

Geng Hao wants you to know he wasn't always a loser. A dim but well-meaning champion cyclist, he became the pitchman for a shady "masculinity tonic" and was promptly stripped of his silver medal and banned from professional racing when it turned out to be dope. Reduced to a life of anonymity and disgrace as a delivery boy, Geng Hao spots the Superman-obsessed shyster who ruined him on television and vows vengeance, but a series of insane contrivances and mishaps, including (but not limited to) mistaken identities, stolen vans, a freeze-dried transsexual assassin and a Triad gang with its own Mandopop theme song all conspire to stand in his way.

An old-style, madcap Hollywood farce on PCP, CRAZY RACER burns rubber into NYAFF compliments of the Chinese bad-boy box office super-team of Ning Hao and Huang Bo, the men who brought you CRAZY STONE. Their latest effort is no less than a master class in balletic, choreographed idiocy, a demented voyage into the shadow side of Looney Tunes slapstick as fueled by meth and gas station junk food, featuring intricately absurdist setpieces and not one but several "crazy racers" on vehicles of varying speed and structural integrity, along with one flaming, flying sea turtle.

The world of CRAZY RACER is populated by a rogues' gallery of larger-than-life grotesques, with festival guest and Rising Star of Asia Award winner Huang Bo leading the pack as Geng Hao, a silly putty-faced megastar who's unafraid to lose his dignity and be the butt of the joke. All the thugs and reprobates in the film are idiots, but none are truly reprehensible, because they're all flailing cluelessly in the muck together, puppets on Ning Hao's gaga-laden strings. You can't help but feel for snaggle-toothed, scraggly-haired Geng Hao, even if he is a perpetual screw-up.

Spot the opening spoof of the Universal Studios logo, the local undertaker's glamorous, "Mafia-style" 'funeral division,' and the offhand raspberry blown at A BETTER TOMORROW, and you'll begin to understand the soaring, lunatic ambition at work here. Ning Hao's puzzle-box narratives and gonzo gangsters are often compared to Guy Ritchie's crime films, but Ning's work is fresher, oozing with ample heart and cracked imagination. Screw-up or not, you won't be able to stop yourself from cheering Geng Hao on as he races through the greedy, back-stabbing, crime-ridden, adulterous, ridiculous, anything-for-a-buck face of modern day, 21st century China.