The School of Rock rule-no matter how cool your dad is, being raised by Jack Black seems like it’d be a lot more fun-is in full effect here: Jonathan, as it happens, is a warlock, and his best friend Mrs. Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro), a shy, bookish, recently orphaned 10-year-old, moves to the fictional town of New Zebedee, Michigan to live with his uncle Jonathan, who is played by Jack Black. In 20 or 30 years, a crop of up-and-coming horror filmmakers will doubtless talk about the formative experience of seeing it as a kid the way people of a certain age and temperament talk about discovering Bellairs.įans of the novel will be happy to hear that its spirit has survived translation to the screen more or less intact, although the plot has been shuffled a little. But he must have channeled his 8-year-old self, because Roth and screenwriter Eric Kripke’s adaptation of The House With a Clock in its Walls is a bullseye, perfectly balanced between funny and scary. His style usually has more in common with thermonuclear war than sharpshooting. That’s a pretty small target to hit, and nothing in Roth’s earlier work suggested he’d be able to do it.
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