Frank Falisi

2 weeks ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi

“Dear God, I hate myself / Dear God, I hate myself”The mirror has two faces but the only one I have lolls to the right a little. The left eye is a touch lazy—maybe the lid is just differently calibrated from the right. An aesthetic of balance eludes me. The eyeballs bug a little, like audio animatronics off-schedule. I never really figured out how to make my mis-blinking face behave, which is to say, look settled and symmetrical.

2 months ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi

In Freehold, New Jersey, movies were the things that played at the local Loews. A multiplex childhood means memories by mass culture: the first movie I ever saw was The Lion King (1994). I remember its shapes most, behemoth blobs and lion-like impressions. The songs were louder than anything I’d ever heard. My first PG-13 movie was Small Soldiers (1998). I drank a caffeinated soda as big as my face and stayed awake all night. I thought I’d never sleep again.

Jan 7, 2025 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi

A house, like a burial, starts with a hole. You dig until there’s room enough for the body that the earth will hold. And then you fill it up, variably with the living and the dead. The first onscreen death to occur in Here—Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel by the same name—happens less than three minutes into the runtime. Roughly 65 million years before the present day, a dinosaur pushes against the egg that encases it.

Dec 11, 2024 | thefilmstage.com | Frank Falisi

Hours before I place my trust in a rush-hour F train departing from Herald Square just 19 days before Christmas, I am speaking with scholar and filmmaker Jerry Carlson about David Bordwell and Orson Welles’ Filming Othello. Nominally a chronicle of Welles’ time adapting Shakespeare’s play, the documentary’s stream of inconsistencies and outright fibs linger with the late critic.

Oct 18, 2024 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi

Say “screwball.” Do you linger on the first part, slink on its slip and milk the sibilance? Screw is: the thing that turns in order to adhere, a colloquial cheat or swindle, an exclamation of disavowal, saying sex without saying sex. Say it again. And that second word? A ball, a blast, a bounce, a dance. Again, it’s the lovemaker’s euphemism! “You sure love to ball.”A certain liberation emerges in unloosening the figurative, in literalizing the poetry of it.