A good movie, but definitely not a masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2019)

Scorsese is a god among directors, he made a lot of movies that are big classic such as Goodfellas and Taxi Drivers. Even his most recent jobs, such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Boardwalk Empire are memorable. So, when The Irishman was announced I was hyped.
I logged in my Netflix account a few days after the release date, and I started watching it. A lot of people said that the movie is too long, 3 hours and a half are in fact way above the average, and my suggestion would be to pick a day where you don't have anything to do and enjoy it. I never felt bored and even if, especially in the end, you may feel the weight of its length, there is always something going on screen. It is just another way to tell the story. Nowadays cinema is too fast, sometimes we need this old style storytelling, that takes his time to develop characters and events in the proper way. Unfortunately the attention span decreased a lot from the audience and speaking with friends and colleagues, a lot of them were not able to watch it all at once. A real shame, because this movie need to be tasted slowly and you need to appreciate every single gradient of the story. Very well curated and very dynamic.
The other big critic is the CGI used to rejuvenate actors. I have to tell that critiques are not completely wrong on this. The work done is... decent, but not perfect. For example, I did not understand why they needed to edit so heavily De Niro's eyes while he was young. And you can see that even if they are young, the movement from actors it is slower than expected. There, even the most advanced technology cannot do much. Anyway, I think that too much importance was given to this aspect of the movie, this is not the reason why you are watching this movie, it is not a Marvel movie, so even if special effects are not perfect, you can easily forgive them.
Even if the movie is well done, we are not at the same level of big classic such as Goodfellas. Don't get me wrong, I liked how Scorsese portrayed the mob during the 70's, and also the rise and the fall of the Irishman, but when you have setted the standard so high with your previous movies, it is difficult to do better. Scorsese is a Master and we are lucky enough to see him alive and to keep producing and directing this kind of productions, even if they are not trending anymore in the mainstream cinema. Sometimes is good to have a reminder how cinema used to be.