Trailers Rule, on Dispatch from the Razor's Edge

"That's part of your problem, you know, you haven't seen enough movies – all of life's riddles are answered in the movies."

- from Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon

So I've figured out, which I already knew, that going to the movies is important to me. I mean, like, any weekend without a cinema visit is incomplete. Anna's not too bothered if there's not something she really wants to see; particularly being so time-pressed these days, she's happy enough to just not go. Whereas I'll go just to go. I want to go.

And anyway so Sunday I took myself down to the cinema and, never even mind the feature, the trailers were totally worth the trip alone. I love trailers – all that emotion compressed and distilled down into a roller coaster two-minutes. A great story well and successfully told, out there in the world now, waiting for you to come into its world. Trailers make me cry a lot – it's the sheer intensity. I don't think I'm totally alone here.

Anyway, Sunday, by the end of this here set of trailers here, I was a lachrymose and breath-sucking wreck. It was the cumulative effect. Let's see how dry-eyed you are by the end of these.

Notes: (True Grit) | (Black Swan) | (Love&OD) | (Way Back)

Then again, maybe I was just hormonal yesterday. Anna re-tuned our Lovefilm list for xmas and we got started with It's a Wonderful Life last night. For a minute it was looking like we were going to cry all the way through. It's funny how you think you know a film cold – but what you really know are a few key scenes that you can replay as mental movies. The rest, the majority of it, can be new again, can affect you deeply. Mark, who sits across from me, and who also does screenwriting, says that this film, story-wise, structurally, is nearly perfect. "It touches everything," he says.

Just what film should do.

art film storytelling video trailers

Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very long walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

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Dispatch from the Razor's Edge is owned and operated by novelist, technologist, vegan, exercise junkie, classical liberal, rambler, and Londoner Michael Stephen Fuchs.


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