Watch The Alcohol Years For Free

Very well executed

Don't listen to the negative reviews

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

###SPOILER FOLLOWS### This woman screwed a lot and drank too much and most likely took too many drugs in the 1980's. ###END###How did I get sucked into watching this film? This is every "man I used to be so bad" story you can get at an AA meeting in any city in the world. Who funded this?I understand, you had fun and you used to be a super cool bad girl. Did we need you to tell us this in a film? Could you not have just bored people at any 12-step meeting rather than putting this on film? Yet, I got sucked into watching this on Sundance. I kept trying to guess when you would hit your bottom. Was it bedding women & men? Was it charging money for sex? Was it a marriage going bad?

This is the story of Carol Morley's wild and wanton years back in the 1980's. The film is a series of talking heads of the people Carol slept and partied with back on the 1980's while she was in a band inter-cut with old film footage and new film footage. Carol doesn't appear on film and the film is structured as if the interviewees are talking to Carol and the inter-cut footage is memory.I think.Then again I really don't care. There is only so much that I can hear about some one's sex life over and over again before I stop caring. Usually about two minutes, this is 50 odd minutes more than that. Actually to be honest the problem is not that I don't want to hear about her sex life, I would, if it was interesting, but its not, its the same basic tale repeated over and over again. There is talk about Carol's partying but mostly people seem to focus on the sex, or so it seemed to me.I watched this hoping that I would find something to latch onto, but I couldn't. I don't know why this would interest anyone other that the director who may or may not have made this in an effort to remember how many people she actually slept with. I have no idea what sort of hubris would make someone think that anyone other than those involved with her would want to see this film.2 out of 10 for the five minutes that the film is interesting.

A more realistic precursor to Michael Winterbottom's '24 Hour Party People', this is a compelling, funny, and poignant memoir of Carol Morley's 'lost' years in Manchester in the early 1980's. The story is told through painfully honest interviews with old friends and acquaintances who reveal that the younger Morley was a wild and promiscuous character. Morley herself never appears on screen, a clever device as the viewer is left to piece her story and her character together (although it's also worth watching the DVD as the director's commentary gives Morley a chance to answer back to some of the comments made about her). A beautifully told insight into a fascinating life, time, city and culture.

an interesting, if narcissistic, examination of identity. Carol Morley - sister of journalist and TV pundit Paul Morley - returns to her teenage stomping ground in Manchester, putting an advert in the local paper for people who remember her. And so we're greeted with a series of talking heads, some famous (Tony Wilson, Vini Reilly) but most unknown. They paint a picture of the years that the documentary maker lost to alcohol and sex. In fact, although she was an artist and in a band, most of the interviewees seem to remember her for her sexual exploits. We never get more than a glimpse of Morley herself but, as the cast of friends and acquaintances talk into the camera, we're forced to become her. It's often intensely personal and uncomfortable, and sometime voyeuristic to the point that you wonder about Morley's motives. But it's nonetheless an interesting glimpse of Manchester at a time when the Hacienda was empty and the Happy Mondays were still practicing in a garage.