"The passion for trains and railways is, I have been told, incurable. I have also learned that there is no cure for torture. These two afflications have been intimately linked in the course of my life, and yet though some chance combination of luck and grace I have survived them both. But it took me nearly fifty years to surmount the consequences of torture".

This is how Eric Lomax wraps up the first part of Chapter 1 of "The Railway Man", the book upon which this movie is based.

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I first became aware of this story a few years back when a colleague of mine lent me a copy. If you haven't seen this book, yet, don't hesitate to find a copy and read it- Lomax, who passed away maybe a year ago now, wrote a powerful and moving account of his life, how he found his way into the British army, wound up in Singapore just in time to become a prisoner of war, suffered mightily at the hands of the Japanese army- especially one interpreter- eventually got rescued when the war ended, and then goes into how his experiences shaped the rest of his life and how reconnecting with that interpreter late in both of their lives allowed him to finally put to rest @#$%& he had been fighting for several decades.

Unfortunately, seeing this movie without leaving the U.S. may be a problem...as of now it has no U.S. release date, and word from the IMDB discussion boards are that it will not get shown in the U.S. until it gets a distributor. The film has already been released in Canada, Spain, Switzerland, and Australia; it opened in the UK and Ireland this past weekend, and has future release dates set for New Zealand, Slovakia, Japan, and the Netherlands. The film has received rave reviews everywhere it's been shown, and there seems to be some speculation they may be holding off a U.S. release until such time as it would be in serious contention for an Oscar- but that is just speculation. If we're lucky, we here might get to see it around the end of this year, if not it could be a while yet.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV