Category: Entertainment

Source: LewRockwell.com

I enjoy a good disaster film. Movies such as San Andreas, Independence Day, Godzilla (in all its many manifestations!) and other such “block busters” are good fun on a rainy afternoon. This is especially true these days when the industry’s present “special effects” give great reality to situations that in earlier days were simply never attempted or if attempted, poorly achieved! Of course, while we watch the ongoing havoc in the film, we are naturally concentrating on the main characters. I remember two particular scenes in San Andreas,  the earthquake taking place in a restaurant in a skyscraper and a tsunami entering San Francisco. Both show the deaths of many people in those two settings as well as the escape of some of the main characters from the mayhem! Of course, one focuses on the main characters, the others – the “extras” are simply consigned to their part of the narrative –  usually death in great numbers! Occasionally, however, there are characters one meets earlier in the film that are then reintroduced before they die. For instance, the tsunami scenes show an elderly couple who had met the main characters earlier on being crushed by the liner, Queen Elizabeth that had been flipped over on top them by the wave! But aside from those infrequent “other people of interest,” for which the audience is expected to display at least a few moments of interest and remorse, the rest of the “deceased” are nothing more than “background” and those who play them in the film are even called “extras” because they have no lines to speak other than the occasional scream.

Continue reading “Extras in the Film of Life – ValerieProtopapas 12/2/22”