Three Films Make A Post: Beneath the city streets lie government secrets. File #7 is missing… Pray they don't find it.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (1993) aka Waga jinsei saiaku no toki: This first movie in Kaizo Hayashi’s Maiku Hama trilogy is a very film school film nerd type of project. It is full of allusions to and plays with tropes and approaches from other movies – mostly from noir, the hard-boiled school and the nouvelle vague.

As it often happens with this approach, the film appears stuffed full of things, or really, overstuffed, leaving little room for a personality that isn’t made exclusively made from other movies. As it also often happens, many of the scenes here are fantastic when looked at on their own, they just don’t add up to much of a whole.

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016): Paul Fegan’s documentary concerns the attempt of Arab Strap’s voice Aidan Moffat of doing a small town tour with his versions of traditional Scottish ballad and folk material. An early encounter with very traditional Scottish ballad singer Sheila Stewart – her rules of folk singing are so purist, most other folk singers wouldn’t cut it – sees her criticizing the project rather vigorously. Her criticism clearly hurts and rankles Moffat in ways he never quite expresses on camera. An off-camera monologue ruminates about Moffat’s doubts, while the film follows him through backrooms, rehearsals and meetings with various somewhat ballad connected people.

This is more an interesting documentary than a successful one, mostly because it seems to be quite able to find out what it actually is about. It attempts to use the Stewart/Moffat divide as a narrative frame, but there’s really not enough substance to it to carry the whole film. Other encounters feel rather random and not always terribly interesting, something that isn’t helped by Moffat’s tendency to throw himself into the pose of a smirking ironicist, which in my experience only is a way to get people to talk when they’re drunk and don’t notice their interlocutor thinks he’s above them. In any case, it’s not a pose I find terribly interesting to watch.

Hidden City (1987): A young woman (Cassie Stuart) drags an at first unwilling statistician (Charles Dance) into the search for a classified film that leads into the lower echelons of espionage, bad commercial art, and all the interesting things barely buried under London’s surface, secrets the people meant to keep them secret have mostly forgotten themselves.

In mood and style Stephen Poliakoff’s movie fluctuates between comedy, a light and very British 80s version of the 70s US conspiracy thriller, and a psychogeographical essay turned movie. This is very much a film about a boring life getting in touch with the weird undercurrents that have always run just a tiny bit below the surface and starting to get in tune with them, shifting his view of the world; the thriller elements are really only there to hang this shift in personal perspective on.