Thanks for the memories!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The bored, lonely wife of a retirement-home physician in North Carolina dreams up an adult embodiment of the baby boy taken away from her when she was an unmarried teenager who got knocked-up at the county fair; her husband, a train enthusiast, has no patience with his wife's melancholia (he's cheating with his lascivious nurse), while the young man stands in not only as her now-grown child but also as a representative of her anger and isolation. Disconnected filmmaker Nicolas Roeg predictably provides no simple solutions for our heroine, and screenwriter Dennis Potter (who would seem to be the perfect movie-companion for Roeg) merrily keeps the inscrutable scenario on a schizophrenic track. This isn't the weirdest movie to come from either Roeg or Potter--the film, in fact, is one of Roeg's more accessible entries--but very few of the details or ideas come to fruition (such as the wife always being dressed in lavender, or her fetish for cartoons and dolls). Gary Oldman, just off "Sid and Nancy" where he played Sid Vicious, seems stuck in a revolving door of violent angst and aggression (only in a later scene, at the piano, does he show some charm), while Christopher Lloyd (as Henry Henry--sort of an update of Humbert Humbert) relies far too much on his rubbery facial expressions. In the lead, Theresa Russell works hard at conveying her character's inner-demons; in the vivid flashback scenes to her youth, she makes a terrific impression just by using her faraway eyes and smile. However, Russell never gets her little-girl twang quite right--her voice sounds disembodied--and her temper tantrums aren't shaped and have no comic pay-off (which is the fault of the director, who turns a blind eye). After the perverse-glossiness of something like 1986's "Blue Velvet", the scrubby ordinariness of "Track 29" is disappointing and dispiriting (it was shot by Alex Thomson, who has worked with Roeg before). Roeg, a brilliant cinematographer in his youth, only gets a kinetic vibe going in those flashbacks to the fairgrounds. Aside from those startling early shots and some stray funny moments, "Track 29" seems to lose its way awfully soon, and the apocalyptic final act is simply a mess. *1/2 from ****

A young man is going around provincial USA searching for his mother that he never saw. As soon as he was born his young and careless parents sent him to mental hospital. Now Gary Oldman is free to go so he decides to find his mother, the one he was missing all those mental hospital days. His mother Linda (Theresa Russell) lives in American dream but doesn't seem to be happy. Her husband is fond of collecting railways for children. Sure, he has one of the largest railway-toy system in the whole state. He is proud of his railway model and pays more attention to his railway-world than to his young wife. Who used to have some nasty experiences before became a noble woman. But all that world is just smashed by the coming of that crazy son, who wants the revenge for such unhappy childhood. Finally Mummy lets her successful husband to meet her naughty son. Great, rather cynic, cold black humour film. www.myspace.com/neizvestnostlab

The plot is wacky enough to promise a great film: a repressed alcoholic middle-class housewife with incestuous tendencies, married to a doctor with infantilism tendencies, encounters a young English guy who turns out to be her lost son (fruit of a teenage rape, whom she had to give for adoption). But it's not clear what's real & what's not. Freud would be proud.The bad thing is seeing how generic Hollywood-ian Nicolas Roeg's direction has become. There really is very little here that reminds of "Don't Look Now" or "Bad Timing". Not that it's not worth watching. The spanking sequence is hilariously disturbing, the film has the feel of a hysterically surreal 80's soap opera, and the interplay between past, present, reality & fantasy is sometimes inspired.In fact David Lynch ended up copying lots of stuff from here, particularly on "Twin Peaks" and "Lost Highway". Notice for example the demonic rape scene, or the merging of the truck driver and lost son characters.

It's a shame to see the talents of actors like Christopher Lloyd, Theresa Russell and Gary Oldman squandered on such a hideous flick (but then, in my humble opinion, every movie I've seen directed by Nick Roeg is rather bad). I'm a HUGE Theresa Russell fan; she's on my list of the top two most beautiful women I've ever seen, and although I could never tire of just looking at Ms. Russell this movie is so very horrible that I could never sit through it even a second time. Ditto "Aria," another of Nick Roeg's works.