I've said this before, but I really wish we'd gotten some sort of commentary track on the DVD/Blu-ray. Sometimes they're not even worth the time spent listening to them, but other times they will go into things like why certain scenes, even though they may have been ones that were really liked by the director/producer(s), got cut. And I still suspect that they're are a lot of scenes in the script that were shot but never made it into the finished film - mainly because Seth Grahame-Smith himself said that enough material for a whole other film (no doubt the mythical whole other film that I brought up a few posts ago
) ended up being cut because when the film was first put together it ran so long. And we also know from Grahame-Smith that the actors who had a good deal of their parts cut were Jonny Lee Miller, Helena Bonham Carter and Chloe Moretz. And barely any of their cut material even made it to the deleted scenes on the Blu-ray, which is a shame. Though as I said when I announced this slideshow, quotes from the deleted scenes that actually are included will show up in the slideshow in their proper place in the film. (For instance, scenes #59 and #61 will show up in May - and scene #108, which actually does pick up somewhat with what was laid down in the dining room scene's sequence between Julia and Vicki, will show up at the end of August and the beginning of September.) Unfortunately, it's quite often the case that a scene or scenes are cut because of the perception that they slow down the momentum of the film. And I'm guessing if that was the case with this film, the momentum of the film was considered to be squarely on Barnabas' shoulders and his story.
As for people in the audience not necessarily picking up on everything that may have been set up in certain scenes, well, the fault of that lies mostly with the audience members themselves and not the film itself because all the set ups and subtexts are there in the scenes. When it comes to me, I know it's definitely my own fault for originally having missed things like Vicki's facial expression when she realizes Julia is the doctor. And the reason it's my own fault is that both times I saw the film in a theater, right after Julia delivered her line about Vicki having secrets, I turned to the person sitting next to me to say how much I loved those lines. I never even saw Vicki's face until I watched the film at home and alone on Blu-ray. And I'm pretty sure that I've already mentioned elsewhere that there are also other things that I didn't notice until I watched on Blu-ray. But in my defense I have to say that the IMAX screen was so big that at times it was often hard to take everything in - especially if there were multiple characters in a scene and on screen. Though one of the things I definitely caught in the theaters was Liz' expression after Julia refers to her as a bitch. Her expression is priceless - as are several other expressions Liz has in the scene at other moments. And those will certainly be gotten into as their places in the slideshow come up.
Also, I thought that swapping bits of Julia and adding them to Liz was a brilliant choice for the film. However discussing that here is really out of scope for this particular topic (at least at this point) because we'd like to keep the discussions here focused more on the quotes from the film that are coming up in the slideshow. The changes to Liz and Julia are broader discussions that are better suited for the film's current main topic, so that's why two posts originally made here in this topic have been moved to that topic (starting here:
Re: Depp/Burton DARK SHADOWS Is In Release!!
).