16 Years of Alcohol

I was not expecting much from '16 Years of Alcohol'. Perhaps an overly sentimental look back at Scottish urban life, perhaps a neo-realist bleakness. But when it started with hypnotically beautiful images of Edinburgh and a voice-over in that recognisable cadence, with repeating cycles of words drawing out every ounce of meaning from clichés like "hope"... well, I knew that I was firmly in Richard Jobson territory, and that maybe he has always been a film-maker at heart. He skirts cliché while playing with it, trying to show the violence endemic in that society and making many references to other films ('Clockwork Orange', westerns, 'Trainspotting', Martin Scorsese, etc.). It is larger than life and demonstrates how the mythic archetypes shape the characters rather too small for the roles they want to adopt.

Kevin McKidd is brilliant as "Frankie", a character the amalgam of Jobson and his brother; I kept forgetting he was not in fact Jobson. The women are incredibly beautiful and yet have a depth of character not commonly seen in films that make women into such visual feasts. They are saviour archetypes but again somehow avoid cliché. How is Jobson doing this? There is some subtle artistry at work here. The cinematography is gorgeous and I was glad for the snippet of Skids on the soundtrack, though 'Love is the Drug' gets the best treatment in a scene that is both scary and hilarious.

The film is dedicated to Jobson's brother, who did not escape the life of alcohol and violence and was murdered a couple of years ago. In the post-film talk at the Dublin Film Festival, Jobson revealed he had in fact run with the most notoriously violent of Edinburgh's youth gangs, until Skids took him away from that. This is quite obviously a very personal film and yet a highly aestheticised interpretation as well.

I did not want the film to end, and would gladly have sat through it a second time immediately. Maybe it's just where I'm at in my life right now. Maybe it's because I have spent so many hours over the years infiltrated by Jobson's aesthetic. Maybe it's just a damned good film.

'16 Years of Alcohol' won Richard Jobson the award for Directorial Debut at the British Independent Film Awards. It has received glowing reviews from Time Out, The Guardian, and Sight and Sound. It has played at festivals the world over. Forget the dismal comments of those too cynical to enjoy real film-making. See this poetic triumph for yourself.

Agreed, pretentious drivel, dull and impossible to care about! To me there were many, many problems with this film - the voiceover is very self-consciously attempting to be poetic but fails, most of the music is very irritating, loutish music for yobs not very popular even when originally released. The acting , Kevin McKidd's portrayal of Frankie is remarkably wooden for an actor that once showed such promise, how far he has fallen in such a short period of time. I suppose he suffered from poor direction, often the problem with a new and inexperienced director and producer afraid to keep his feet on the ground, pretentious aspirations have run riot, an attempt to make a "worthy" film, has unfortunately steered this ship on to the rocks of self indulgence. Agreed the story may be personal and minimal but in my opinion who should or could care about such ugly, cruel youths or their fates. I found my self almost immediately emotionally detached from all the characters though bored indifference. Comparisons to 'Ratcatcher' are truly laughable. Another film by a native of Edinburgh that made the Edinburgh Festival (historically automatic for any film ever made in Edinburgh) that also suffers from being shot on high definition for £450,000, for goodness sake with that amount of money the film could have easily been shot on superior 35mm film which would have made the film look much better rather than the 'Dogma' video looking quality print that I saw in Edinburgh, why do people working on tape always say that it looks so much like 35mm film, when to shoot on film would mean it would automatically look like film instead of automatically demoting the film to DVD/ Video sell through, because when projected the majority of cinema goers including myself hate paying to see washed out grainy, poor quality blown up video images. The direction will not move you I guarantee and as for the production values...who goes to see, rents or buys films for their production values? At the end of the day you pay your money to be entertained or moved and you will fail to receive either from this debut, sadly this film is pretentious drivel, the critics will slaughter it and the investors will loose their shirts, harsh but an economic truth. Yet another British embarrassment on its way to festivals guaranteed to be laughed at, with jaws dropped open in shock, by our American cousins.

This is on one level a very gritty story of alcohol abuse and violence; on another it is an aesthetically realised elegy to hope and hopelessness. The beautiful images of historic Edinburgh are used unpretentiously as a backdrop to mindlessly savage beatings and physical intimidation, cinematic techniques involving varied use of lighting, colour, slow motion and overt symbolism. In one scene, the dead-end nature of the lives of people in a bar is demonstrated by showing them as corpses, seated with their drinks and covered in cobwebs, as the main protagonist looks on and questions his own downward-spiralling life of drink and vengeance. There is some light in the character of Helen, an art school graduate whose love might inspire hoodlum Frankie to give up his drunken brawling loud-mouthed ways, but ultimately the story of the slow and painful attempts of an alcoholic to reform himself will be too easily forgotten. The artistic attempts of writer/director and former Skids band-member Richard Jobson are what make the biggest impression – it remains to be seen whether Jobson can subsequently produce of work of creative genius rather than something that simply suggests considerable talent.

I'm not a huge film buff but I went to see a screening of this film at the GFT in Glasgow on Monday and Richard Jobson was giving a Q & A afterwards.

Thought his answers to the audience were good and definitely helped make sense of the film a bit much. He made some really good points about the types of films coming out of Scotland these days and how he was trying to get away from that drab reality style we're used to seeing.

it's worth seeing anyway, I wouldn't write it off straight away.

One can't say that Scottish films about the 70s come to often, but this is one time too many. Kevin McKidd does the Edinburghian skinhead, who can't fight his past (or maybe that is what he actually does, beating people up). The past is a father who cheats on his mother and the son who never really get involved, never takes part in anything.

He is somewhat rehabilitated, or is he really? There is an intellectual narrator voice here in contrast to the violent acting of McKidd. Everything becomes too obvious, but that doesn't make things easier to understand.

A failure and only halfway interesting.