I'm still pretty vague about how I feel with this movie. I don't know wether to celebrate it's obvious disregard for traditional structure or go with my initial feeling, which was unsatisfactory. Also, the 3d was so good it was distracting. Really, it was just too fucking good. Scorsese has always been flashy and I've always love his films for that so I don't have a problem with the way he really thought out all these shots in 3d to make them work in 3d. But damn it was hard to keep track of things when most of the time I was thinking "holy shit that is so cool".
Beyond that, I agree with the comment about the long pauses between dialogues. That surprised me and put me off because it's so weird coming from the Scorsese-Schoonmaker team. I would bet you could trim 20 minutes of this movies with just those pauses. And most of the Sacha Baron Cohen's stuff was superfluous, particularly his coming back as the bad guy at the end. Some of it was not funny at all.
Yet I also share the sentiment and the experience of being about to cry for at least three times when the movie became about cinema itself. The honesty of the whole thing is almost heartbreaking, and I think Kingsley was really good in this performance. Don't know if anyone has read Ebert's review of this movie but his take on how this could be Scorsese's most personal film, almost autobiographical is pretty spot on.
It's a beautiful film to look at and listen to (this is the first of Howard Shore's scores for Marty that stands out for me) and the performances are great. To be honest what I now see as flaws (the weird structure, the "lecture" quality of the film history segments, etc...) may be later seen as wins. But I'm pretty sure a lot of the Baron Cohen and his dog stuff could be left out and no one would miss it. I'm curious as to how kids actually react to it, anyone has seen this with a young kid?
