He selected one and handed it to me, without charging me extra for the exchange,” Remo recalls.Īnd that is how his lifelong love affair with the flute began. Now he reached into a bag he kept on the ground, where he had his ‘serious’ instruments. “He gave me a curious look and said, ‘Wah wah, just now you couldn’t even blow a sound out of it.’ He had sold me one of the toy flutes for children. Half an hour later as he walked back to the hostel he stopped at the vendor’s and told him the wind instrument played wrong notes and asked for a better one. “Among the vendors of balloons, children’s toys and so on at the entrance to the beach, I saw a flute seller, with flutes sticking out like little branches from a long stick he held upright,” Remo writes in the book, published by HarperCollins India. So he decided to spend the hour at the Chowpatti Beach nearby. Her hostel had stricter visiting hours, and once when he went there too early he was told to come back in an hour. " is rated PG-13 and contains some violence.His girlfriend lived in the Government Girls’ Hostel on Marine Drive in Mumbai, right next to the Taraporewala Aquarium. The most elementary requirement of an action movie is that the hero know the score, be in command - it lends tension to the moments when he's not in command - a requirement that screen writer Christopher Wood blithely neglects.Īw, forget it - just tell me when it ends. But Ward makes no move for her, which is generally the problem with "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Guy Hamilton, who directed four of the James Bond movies, "structures" the movie as a series of arbitrary set pieces, situations that don't grow out of the story: It's just, "Wouldn't it be neat if there was a chase on the scaffolding around the Statue of Liberty?" Chiun emphasizes that the mark of a good assassination is making it look like an accident, but instead of the obvious (having Grove perish from one of his own defective weapons), Hamilton substitutes a big "cliffhanger" sequence that involves a large log that is, for some reason, suspended in midair on a trolley.Īs an afterthought, a romantic element is added - Kate Mulgrew as an Army major in the Lois Lane mold. The fuming indignantly is the part you identify with. Which leaves the generally riveting Ward little but a series of reaction shots in which he alternately fumes indignantly or laughs indulgently. Chiun's supposed to be quaintly funny - he (ha ha) watches soap operas and (ho ho) hates junk food ("You know why Americans call it fast food? Because it speeds them on their way to the grave"). Don't try this at home, boys and girls, but by the end of it Remo is able to dodge bullets. In what seems to be a direct lift from "The Karate Kid," Grey - who should be grateful for the heavy Oriental makeup because people won't realize it's Joel Grey - runs Remo through a maddening training course, which seems to consist of insults, steamed rice and running on the beach. Yeah, but what about that adventure that's supposed to begin? We watch a graph of the costs of one of Grove Industries' weapons systems go up, up, up across the computer screen - finally, a movie about fighting defense cost overruns!įor all of you who have muttered, "Les Aspin wears combat boots" (and I know you're out there), now he does. Hold on - it says here "the adventure begins."īrimley, giving a performance as droopy as his mustache, sits punching at a computer, which shows us the villain, George Grove (Charles Cioffi), a defense department contractor who is "good, real good" at doing all sorts of bad, real bad things. They surgically alter the cop's features, remove his fingerprints and christen him Remo Williams (Fred Ward) - under the tutelage of Korean martial arts expert Chiun (Joel Grey), he'll become their secret weapon. "Everywhere you look," you see, "slime is on the loose" "our legal system doesn't work the way it should," and these boys have some cleaning up to do. Preston), who report only to the president, fakes the cop's murder and kidnaps him. when does the adventure begin?Ī top-secret group led by Smith (Wilford Brimley) and MacCleary (a nicely glowering J.A. And if you needed it, there's the tip-off on a movie that doesn't do anything right.īut wait a minute. Now, the mustache is right, but it's well known that New York cops, as a matter of principle (and possibly police regulation), only drink coffee out of blue and white paper cups bearing the legend "It's Our Pleasure to Serve You" beneath an artist's rendering of the Parthenon. The cop reaches up and takes a sip of coffee from a plain Styrofoam cup. ," the camera pans down from the Brooklyn Bridge to a black-mustachioed policeman, sitting in his patrol car, listening to the Knicks game on his radio. At the beginning of "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.
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