This is Kelvin Tong’s 3rd feature film if I didn’t miscount.

This movie weaves 4 stories about the people who have lived, worked and fell in love in Great World, an amusement park in Singapore back in the 40s – 70s.

I wasn’t even born when the park was closed so I do not know much about the place except that they built Great World City at the same spot where Great World used to be. I’m also hearing from my mother that Great World was pretty accurately depicted in the movie. I’ll just take her word for it.

I really liked the movie for it’s entertainment value and quality. I’d say it’s one of the best if not the best locally produced film I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t abstract (like Eric Khoo movies) or lame (like most Jack Neo movies). It a family movie which had plenty of punch-lines.

What I liked about the movie was how smart the dialogue was and that the almost all the dialogue was in dialect with a dash of Singlish. It felt more authentic that way. I liked how the scriptwriters played with words in the dialogue. It was super hilarious!! If you don’t understand dialect, it’s fine, they subtitles are pretty accurate and you still can get the joke. Though I must say that you’ll still need to be Singaporean to understand certain things.

As the movie is a Raintree Production, half of the actors and actresses in MediaCorp were enlisted to act in the movie. Also, you can actually see the difference in the acting calibre between the older actors & actresses vs the younger ones. Experience definitely makes a difference and they were so much more convincing in their roles.

I think the make up team who did Chew Chor Meng’s make up when he was an old man deserve a special mention. They did a pretty good job making him look like a crinkly old man. It was actually good but there’s still room for improvement. I saw the bump where the wig met the stuff they pasted on Chew Chor Meng’s face to turn him into an old man.

Anyway, it’s a movie worth watching to get a glimpse of a Singapore that most of us never knew.