AJ Goes to the Dog Park

AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK   **1/2

Toby Jones

2025

IDEA:  Upon discovering that his local dog park has been replaced by a "blog park," an incensed Fargo man decides to take on the Mayor by whatever means necessary.

BLURB:  The spirits of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, The Simpsons, and any number of lo-fi Adult Swim programs course through AJ Goes to the Dog Park, a proudly ridiculous film that operates on no other principle than untrammeled absurdism. There is a plot, and character development, and some faint themes about paternalism and obsession, but the film mostly proceeds as a loosey-goosey string of gags that treat space, time, matter, and the English language like Play-Doh. With echoes of the similarly Midwest-set Hundreds of Beavers, albeit on a more modest scale, AJ Goes to the Dog Park knows no bounds to the ways in which it will cartoonishly bend itself, whether through props, chromakey, exaggerated sound effects, non-sequiturs, or simply people acting very strangely. This is a film in which the main character turns into a dummy for a single shot so his head can be punched off and dunked into a basketball hoop by a burly man training him in the art of elbow fighting. There are people-shaped holes in doors, detours into comic-book art and parodic erotica, and nonsense wordplay that reinvents syntax (“Shall we? Let’s shall!,” or “No sir! Nor, no m’am!”). The result of all this is a cheerful semiotic breakdown that you rarely encounter in even the most outré of bigger-budget productions. While liberating for a while, the shenanigans can become tiring, and there’s little in the perfunctory camerawork or acting to keep the juices flowing for the full 75 minutes. Yet, how do you pick apart a movie this unpretentious, this scrappily creative and earnestly homegrown? The success of AJ Goes to the Dog Park is exactly in its transparent desire to be the kind of unassuming, DIY termite art it knows it is.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT   ***1/2

Raven Jackson

2023

IDEA:  A girl grows into womanhood in rural Mississippi.

BLURB:  Haptic cinema in the most intentional sense, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is designed to generate a flow of affect between bodies onscreen and off. Through protracted closeups — typically of hands that are reaching, grasping, holding, caressing, and always, always feeling — the film centers skin and the act of touch as our primary interfaces with the world, entangling the body of the spectator with the diegetic space. Jomo Fray’s rich, tactile cinematography, Lee Chatametikool’s elliptical but spare editing, and an ambient soundscape of insect drone and birdsong entrain us to a slower, thicker temporality, which is to say a deeply embodied one in which sensation supersedes narrative and cognition. In this sensory regime, existence is experienced as a shifting field of intensities where borders dissolve into a chiastic intercorporeality. Unsurprisingly, if perhaps too-pointedly, water in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is not just an aesthetic motif but a guiding metaphor (and synecdoche) for porous bodies that cry tears and absorb and transmit affect, memory, knowledge, and emotion. It’s possible Jackson could have been less withholding in regard to her characters and story, more willing to temper her abstractions with psychological interiority, but there’s something welcome about a portrait of black womanhood that denies such conventional apprehension. Here, we’re asked to feel from the inside rather than interpellate from without, and the results are often transcendent in their palpability.