Well, it looks like I'm pretty close to finished with my fan-edit of
THE SHADOW. I've chopped about 17min from the film, including everything related to Alec Baldwin being a ruthless Chinese warlord (heh) and
that magical knife with the (IMHO) poorly-animated-sfx face. There were also quite a few little snips from conversations where the dialogue got a bit too goofy.
As I've become more familiar with the film on a shot-by-shot basis, I have to say that the major failing for me are some very shoddy-looking SFX shots and a really intrusive score. I was surprised, because I actually have a copy of the score on CD and enjoy it, but when mixed into the film it begins to grate on me.
Correcting the audio is really my only task left before finishing. One of the real issues when trying to re-edit a commercial film is that you tend to cut and re-arrange in visual terms, and can work around dialogue, but background music will start/stop abruptly or become disjointed unless you're careful to smooth out those rough spots as best you can. With a brassy, intrusive score like this one, it takes a long time to make the new transitions smooth and (hopefully) not noticeable to the average viewer.
