Pluskylang Great Film overall

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Chad Shiira Narrative pyrotechnics is not the exclusive domain of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman("Being John Malkovich", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"); it just seems that way. Nobody in Hollywood, off-Hollywood, or around the world, pulls off meta- with more lunacy, heart, and panache than the erudite iconoclast who forced the writers' branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to nominate his doppleganger, an identical twin brother named Donald, for Best Adapted Screenplay, 2002's "Adaptation", a film that "Be With Me" can be favorably compared with. But rather that skewer the blockbuster mentality of contemporary Hollywood movies, in which Kaufman created an alter-ego to purposely sabotage his winsome love story about real-life writer Susan Orlean(played by Meryl Streep) and an orchid thief with inappropriately formulaic screen writing, this gentle film from Singapore goes after something even more elevated. "Be With Me" attempts to be the missing link that sutures the documentary with the filmic tradition of neorealism.An old man grieves over the recent death of his wife; a morbidly obese security guard swoons over an oblivious, and unattainable woman; a teenage lesbian is forsaken by a bi-curious vamp who jilts her for a boy; three linked stories that are interrupted well into "Be With Me" by a seemingly incongruous fourth one, an adaptation of a blind and deaf woman's memoir that plays like non-fiction. Her name is Theresa Chan, who like Orlean(author of "The Orchid Thief"), are installed in a narrative that tells the story of the forthcoming book's creation. While "Adaptation" may seem like the bolder film, "Be With Me" goes ones step further than the Spike Jonze-directed mind bender by having Chan play herself. With very little staging, the documentary within the narrative film(Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien used this technique in 1993's "Xi meng ren sheng") records the startling competency of this severely disabled woman who can cook her own meals and teach disabled children like herself to cope, to live. With modest daring, the documentary doesn't exist in a vacuum. Extracts from Chan's memoir on the screen like subtitles, as if silence itself was a foreign language. By not providing a voice-over, the film respects the interior language of the hearing impaired. Chan's subtitles mirror the camera's focus on the text-messaging that substitutes for spoken dialogue between "dumbangel 67" and "sympgirl". The correlation being: technology turns us into virtual handicaps. The two girls can't see or hear each other when they text message or chat online.The man who accompanies Theresa to the market and bring her meals is also the widower's son. After his father shut down the modest grocery store he ran with his late wife, the old man exiled himself into a desensitized world of his own making. The black covering that shrouds the storefront gate looks like a metaphor for his "blindness". He lives with the ghost of his wife, a woman he can't see or hear. To lift his handicap, the son gives the father a Chinese translation of Chan's memoirs. In "Being John Malkovich". Craig Schwartz(John Cusack) discovers a portal that allows people to hack into another man's consciousness. Although there's no on-screen portal in "Be With Me", a similarly divine gateway is suggested by the son's ability to maneuver between both, the fictional and non-fictional diegeses of the film. Neo-realism, the Italian tradition of using real people in real locations, is given a self-reflexivity when the son visits his father, and then the lesbian, who is hospitalized after the security guard averts her attempt at suicide by sheer happenstance. The son instigates an alchemy wherever he goes. When the father reads Theresa's autobiography, the real words of the living and breathing turns this cipher into a real man. A ghost, a fictive story element that's anathemic to neorealism, no longer has a place in the spatial reality of the reconstituted father, transformed by his intertextual son and the text he carries from the real world. The father's corporeality is finalized when he boards the bus to deliver Theresa's food he prepared for her in person."Be With Me", far from being simply an "art" film, is a heart film. It's both metaphysical and emotional. Brilliant!

josephchiang-1 I've watched all of Eric Khoo's films and I think this is one of his best. I like the way the stories are told, except that I think the 3 stories are somewhat 'forced' to connect with one another, especially the part where Jackie jumped and killed the fat guy instead. I can't help but keep feeling that is the way out for the writer to make the stories connect, which is not really necessary. But then again, I'm just being critical because it's an Eric Khoo's movie.Apart from that, it's a nice effort!Go get the DVD if you can, and just enjoy the film.7 out of 10.

YNOTswim A very inspiring Singapore film "Be with Me" poetically explores the human desire of longing for love. The pictures shows a elder shopkeeper moans his passing wife, a fat awkward guy secretly admires a girl, and two high school girls madly fall in love, then maybe not. Through these three groups of seemingly unrelated people from different walk of lives, the picture shows us how universal and powerful the longing for love really is. Then the film cuts into its "documentary" element about Theresa Chan, whose real life autobiography is the inspiration of this film. Theresa Chan became deaf and blind since the age of fourteen. In the film, Theresa Chan (who plays herself) makes her life joyful and makes an incredible impact of the lives of others, and eventually connected those three group people blended in the movie. The cinematography of this film is simply amazing. It's the quiet type of film, out of ninety-three minutes, the film only has a two and a half minute dialogue. But strangely, it's not a depressing film. When the movie is over, you feel inspired by Theresa Chan.When the credits roll, the casts are listed under three categories: "Mean to be," "Looking for love," and "So in love." I can't help but fitting myself in one of those categories. I found out that I can't be put into any one single category exclusively. Is that the message this film is trying to let me to take home with? We are all in this game longing for love, no matter who you are.

sangsara A rewarding experience, albeit one that seems at least 30 minutes longer than it actually is. The slow buildup is for the most part careful foundation building for the second half of the film, a rarity in Singaporean film and a testament to Khoo's ever-growing maturity as a filmmaker and controller of pace, although when that second half comes, it feels like a jarring switch not unlike the one pulled by David Lynch in the middle of his 1997 film, Lost Highway. The signs are present that Khoo worked to bridge the discontinuity of the 3 stories and the order in which they are presented (foreshadowing and foregrounding of certain recurring visual images), but the fact that he does not perfectly succeed is of little detriment to the final product.It is a well-made movie consisting of one strong tale of strength, recovery, and the beauty of love bookended by two other stories that would have benefited from being drawn as their own entities and stood up and apart from the central story of the blind and deaf Theresa Chan (pretty much Singapore's own Helen Keller). Instead, they try to conform to the model of sparse dialogue and psychostylistic sense-deprivation that serves that story so well - the result being that they appear unevenly matched. Still, a fine film.(previously posted at 1minreview.com)