To say Jack is a lousy director in Ah Long Pte Ltd is really an unfair statement by the critics.

Incidentally, our office recently engaged Jteam Production to do a social commercial to promote the importance of Character Education, a one-minute production entirely shot by Jteam and its crews. Mr Jack Neo personally directed the production. The social commercial will be shown via Internet and on TV soon.

To save costs, since this is a social message good for the public, Jack used his son as one of the casts and my house as one of the location shoots.

Frankly, it was one of the most interesting experiences I had working with Jack and his crew. More than 50 production crews, actors and humongous amounts of props were employed in a single day. To shoot the production in a single tiring day is also a means to save costs.

Personally, I have seen Jack shouting NG (No Good) at his youngest son in a scene more than 30 times and many times reprimanded him for not acting properly. As a child social worker, at that point of time, I felt sorry for his son and those child actors and actresses but Jack's professionalism to ensure a job is well done really left a very deep impression on me. (Please note he was certainly very nice with those child actors and actresses, including his son. His ways of teaching the children about being professional and doing small things well is a very effective way of character building in children. He was firm but not abusive).

To stay unbiased with what the critics said, I decided to watch the three most talked about movies during this Chinese New Year with my family - my two sons, 15 and 16 years old, and my wife - the last two days.

Movies are meant to entertain. Period. As far as my family is concerned, I must say we all unanimously agreed that Ah Long Pte Ltd gave us more laughs, joy and entertainment and things to discuss about as compared to the other two movies, CJ7 and Kung Fu Dunk.

Just to emphasise, I am a die-hard fan of Stephen Chow's nonsensical comedies and my two sons are die-hard fans of Jay Chou. My wife is a 'all movie are the same, accompanying member by the way' woman. I was surprised to see her all smiles after watching Ah Long Pte Ltd.

I must say Ah Long Pte Ltd is a movie worth watching as among its much slapstick jokes, the movie really set us thinking about how we should behave as human beings in this cruel and difficult world. The show gave many character-building messages.

Singaporeans, hear this. Today we are no longer competing regionally with Malaysia and Indonesia. Today, Singapore is already at a platform of competing with the global communities. Singapore has to change and change fast to stay competitive or we will be edged out by the growing Third World economies.

Our future generation will be greatly affected if we remain critical, the Singapore way; just complain and not offer any solutions.

Let us not be critical for the sake of complaining. Shooting ourselves in the foot will not help us grow as a nation. Let us all support local productions, whether it is a play or a movie production, give suggestions, do not put our own people down and be so personal as to call Jack a bad director. He does not deserve such remarks.

I want to encourage Singaporeans to watch Ah Long Pte Ltd and help our local movie industry in order to create a positive cycle so that, one day, our local productions can be comparable with those of more matured countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan or even China.

Finally, I like to end by saying that I do not know Jack Neo personally before except for the one day we were together shooting the social commercial. I deal mostly with his staff in Jteam Production.

My views above are personal and unbiased and, again, I enjoyed Ah Long Pte Ltd wholeheartedly and a four-star rating should be awarded, given the limited budget and resources to produce this movie.

Bravo! Jteam and the crew! Keep it up!

Dr Raymond Cheong