That’s…excellent.
We need “Abram’s Knife” to enter the parlance.
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Abram’s Knife appears out of nowhere, and the only reason the audience knows it’s significant is because the narrative explicitly says so, but at the same time the importance of its appearance is never actually addressed and then it’s forgotten about altogether immediately after its use.
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So the definition would go like this…
Abram’s Knife (n): Popularized by director JJ Abrams. A writing convention used by hack writers and incompetent directors where an object (see “Mystery Box”) is suddenly introduced into a story with little or no foreshadowing. This introduction is often the result of a seemingly random contrivance or an act of pure happenstance. Once an Abram’s Knife is found, the main characters have little to no subsequent interaction with it. While the object is treated (for a very short period of time) as something important, once an Abram’s Knife has been used it leads to no functional advancement of the plot, results in no meaningful character development, and it is immediately discarded. For the rest of the story, the existence of the Abram’s Knife is either ignored or forgotten as though it had never existed. Multiple Abram’s Knives are often used in a chained sequence as a means to introduce artificial mystery to a plot and unnecessarily lengthen the story (see “Padding”).
Antonyms: Chekov’s Gun … McGuffins
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Quick! To TVTropes!
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Yeah, if it’s going to be a thing, we need more examples.
And it probably needs to be compared to other, existing tropes that are similar but not quite exactly the same thing.
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Good point. On TvTropes (which I could easily get as lost on as a Wikipedia deep dive, lol) there is some overlap with the A** Pull and maybe a little bit with Deus ex Machina. However in ROS I don’t recall the knife being the solution to an unsolvable problem…it was a map that led to another map that led to Emperor Palpatine. There were any number of other solutions that would’ve been simpler and/or more interesting. The real function of Abram’s Knife was to force the characters to run all over the galaxy in order to meet some other characters and learn some back story on each other in such a way that it led to an extra hour’s run time. And it’s during this runaround that we’re given some explanation for how the knife even ended up where the characters found it, but it ultimately feels very contrived. It’s not that it’s a completely random coincidence, but it is just plain unnecessary. So if that was factored into the definition, Abram’s Knife would be considered a subtrope of Padding
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I feel like this is how all James Bond movies work (except Dr. No, I guess, which really only had one location).
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Wow, usually when I hear a film is notable via word of mouth, it turns out to be surprising.
In the case of the $15k budgeted independent horror film Skinamarink, it has been a long, long time since I was utterly disappointed in a film, and the first time I’ve ever flipped off a film once the credits rolled!
Imagine someone taking a short film concept that might work for 15-20 minutes, and stretching it out to 100 minutes…but the film drags so much, you’d swear it was 150 minutes!
Basically, several young children find things in their home disappearing. Parents, doors, windows…and there seems to be a strange presence…but who can really tell? We barely get to see who these kids are (the summary says they are 4 and 6, but who can tell when the most we see of them are glimpses of their feet walking around!). The kids seem relatively calm, and I guess, can operate the TV and/or VCR given the public domain cartoons they watch. They also see, relatively calm about this whole situation for the most part.
Halfway through the film, I began to think about Coleman Francis’ The Beast of Yucca Flats, given he dubbed everyone in later, and you never saw a moving mouth (much like in thks film). Plus, like a Coleman Francis film, I soon gave up caring about anyone in this film. The camera is usually capturing stuff like TV light on a ceiling, or someone moving LEGO toys, but we don’t know who (supposedly, it’s…the ‘it!’).
There are times the camera lingers on darkness for what seems like 3-5 minutes, but soon I just wanted to shout: “Get on with it!”
There are several jump scares, but even they get annoying.
This is one film that I cannot believe is getting A ratings! It reminds me of people going to an art gallery, and claiming something as meh as someone painting a canvas black is considered ‘art.’
To me, the film wasn’t scary, it was tedious! I daresay, I could see this ranking up there with Birdemic and The Room, though I daresay riffing this one may make some people crack, like the gang started to do during the likes of Manos, The Catle of Fu Manchu, and The Killer Shrews.
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I recently ran across Paris When It Sizzles starring Audrey Hepburn and William Holden. Well, I love Audrey, I love Paris, let’s watch it!
I was actually physically ill by the end of this. . .thing. It was stupid and full of some of the most toxic masculinity I’ve ever witnessed on screen. I guess there’s a good reason this classic film buff had never heard of it before.
What a waste of good Technicolor.
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