Neo's winning box-office formula

JACK Neo might have made a better businessman than a filmmaker: over two dozen movies in, the writer-director is still shooting them like one long commercial with blatant product placements scattered throughout the plot.

In his latest, Long Long Time Ago, expect not-so-subtle plugs for electric fans, health tonics, a homegrown construction company and more finding its way into the script.

At best, the audience can brush it off knowing that it is par for the course when they buy a ticket to one of Neo's movies; at worst, a scene's dramatic impact gets compromised like it so often does here, the first of a two-part period melodrama set against the backdrop of the birth of Singapore.