Woof. Took myself to an afternoon matinee of this at the Davis as I visit my favorite of my many home towns, Chicago, for my birthday weekend. It’s not that there are no pleasures in this movie, the actors are all bringing it, production design super fun of course, but goddamn did I not laugh more than three times in this interminable 2hr 20min runtime (the original is 90min and this has way less plot while somehow having way more characters, what the fuck). Certainly respect going for the full MacArthur Park, but I can only say it was an almost totally laugh free experience for me and the five other people who came to see a movie while the Bears are playing lol. Swing and a big ol miss for me, even though I honor all three generations of my crush queens, Catherine, Winona, and Jenna, none of it is their fault. It’s just one of the absolute corniest and most predictable scripts I’ve ever come across.

Edited to add: The Jeffrey Jones of it all. It's handled so strangely. Because on the one hand, yes, we cannot have this registered criminal pervert in the movie, so okay, yes, we kill his character off. But, to do this they make a little Jeffrey Jones claymation sequence, and then feature his face in honestly about 15 or so prominent shots, either on his gravestone or some memorial picture or photos in a book or something, and then, because we deal with the Afterlife here, we meet him again anyway post-death, and he's kind of in it all, to nearly the last shot, as a constant presence. The vibe then is "no we can't or shouldn't work with this guy who is still alive, but we will nonetheless remind you of him all the way through, which only makes you remember and think through why he is not featured, despite, as you're continually thinking, being alive still and probably available for work to say the least." Not sure it was the best way to handle the situation, lol, might help explain my very low rating.