Obex

One of the least consequential but more intriguing facets of our age of technology acceleration is watching which flavor of tech nostalgia will be the next to manifest. Take vinyl, for instance, which has made the long journey over only the last 40 years from dominant music-listening format to obsolescence to Millennial zeitgeist-fueled renaissance and is now trending back toward disfavor as the CD revival gathers force — not coincidentally, just in time for computer form factors to have near entirely abandoned optical drives. On the other hand, the world of video games, shorter in tooth as it is, has been afforded less time with which to mount any vintage revival, and its symbiotic growth — both in profits and creativity — alongside the microprocessor monolith means the prospect of any full-scale retro revolution always seemed more far-fetched than in other, less post-naughts-tech-indebted artforms. The development of the video game medium feels more tangibly evolutionary than creationary, but this slipstream relationship between generations means that past and present more easily fold into one another, negating the need for and presence of the cleaner lineations than have defined previous booms of specific tech nostalgia. Emulators have only been building in sophistication and scope since the mid-’90s and were finally made available in the Apple app store in 2024, ROM hacking and homebrew software have led to genuine innovation, and Nintendo has even integrated access to past console catalogues via their Switch subscription service, meaning the born-online, tech-literate-as-tots Gen Alpha may very well be more versed in legacy gaming than those born during their prime.

Into this emerging era of video game mutualism and alternating currents enters Albert Birney’s OBEX, a film that has little to do with and nothing to say about such narratives of industry evolution, but which arrives with a playful 8-bit aesthetic that speaks directly to the overlap of this historical space and present concerns of technological oversaturation.The film opens in a wash of yesteryear tech ephemera: a Macintosh 128K, a dot matrix printer spitting out pin-feed paper, a staticky CRT TV (the news on which sets the film in September 1987). Conor (Birney) is an ASCII artist who produces printed portraits using his aforementioned cutting edge rig and exists somewhere on the anxious-agoraphobe continuum. He lives alone with his dog Sandy, receives Wednesday grocery deliveries from his neighbor Mary (an unseen Callie Hernandez), and otherwise immerses himself in solitary digital pursuits. But when he stumbles across a print ad for the new state-of-the-art video game OBEX and orders it, things begin to get weird… and high adventure… and Lynchian.

It’s that last descriptor that is likely to somewhere in the early going offer an inflection point for viewers. Shot in black-and-white and with palpable aesthetic shades of Eraserhead and Videodrome, as well as inserts of grotesquerie and freighted symbolic imagery — Birney utilizes the 1987 Brood X cicada emergence to shade the proceedings with a hint of apocalyptic texture, for instance — there’s reason for momentary concern that the whole of the project will amount of little more than amiable Lynchian pastiche. But tapping out too early on the basis of such an assumption would be a mistake. After Conor quickly abandons the seemingly half-assed game, he soon discovers a printout with the ominous directive “REMOVE YOUR SKIN” filling the page, after which Sandy is kidnapped in the middle of the night by a digital demon who emerges from the TV — and who amusingly looks like AGGRO DR1FT’s Toto (or Birney’s own The Beast Pageant) filtered through overexposed X-ray imagery, with a dash a flicker effect thrown in for good measure. In addition to the Lynch associations, the thematic concerns Birney develops here also recall Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, but from here BIrney actually moves in a more unexpected direction, as Conor is pulled into a Zelda-esque fantasy world, replete with a shopkeeper hawking useful wares for Conor’s quest, a cartological sketch of the limited world (no roads, ending with a castle in The Nightmare Realm where Sandy is presumably being held), and a new Robin Hood-style hat for our adventuring hero. After besting a horde of bug people, he also scores himself a sidekick named Victor (Frank Mosely), named after the RCA Victor tube TV he boasts as a head (admittedly not a typical fantasy realm signifier).

If there’s disappointment to OBEX, it comes in its second stretch feeling a bit short-circuited, arriving well over halfway in and registering as a bit too abbreviated next to the more patient first act. In our present age of film bloat, where disposable properties like M3GAN 2.0 forego the opportunity for potent short form camp in favor of two-hour capital-T thoughts of the middle school variety, it’s rare for a genre property to beg for length, but Birney’s latest would have benefitted from extended play in the lo-fi fantasy realm the director conjures, its aesthetic character harkening to pre-Anxious Generation days of childhood recreation, where the backyard shenanigans and Nintendo sleepovers were far more psychologically symbiotic activities. Still, in the end it’s precisely this intersection that Birney manages to fill OBEX’s frames with, his vision both playful — this may be the best (non-)video game adaptation cinema has yet produced — and moving, culminating in a more introspective, earnest work than many of his most recent projects. Where something like Strawberry Mansion saw Birney’s imaginative capacity push toward what felt like willful eccentricity and twee genre noodling in unproductive ways, OBEX’s nostalgia-twinged proceedings reflect a more melancholic ache for the community and joy of early gaming console days, a time when a sense of wonder was not yet deadened by the tempest of screens that permeate all of modern life. But while there may be nods and hat-tips toward such contemporary discourse, Birney smartly avoids any pedantic dithering, preferring to keep the subtext implied and the text intimate and direct: “By playing the game, you killed your dog.” What happier ending, what better riposte to The Nightmare Realm, then, can one imagine than sitting, unplugged and screen-free, on the beach with your dog, waves lapping against one perfect moment. — LUKE GORHAM

Bullet Infinity

Contrary to its name, the attention economy thrives not on attention, but on precisely that gray zone between awareness and unconsciousness which brings forth the subliminal and hallucinates the sublime. Thus it is that advertisements, not academic treatises, are said to induce a feeling approaching instant satiation: its colors and sounds bring to fore products and wants, enticing the viewer with a strange satisfaction of being recognized and profiled, even before a single thought is sublimated out of this bundle of impulses. Like the reality behind the billboards of John Carpenter’s They Live, obedience and conformity form the cornerstones of the advertising industry, and not necessarily in a knowing, ideological way. The less you know, really, the better.

But knowing is what a mysterious religious group desires, and in their province of truth-seeking, woe betide the false prophets of late-night TV whose promulgation of flash deals and overall gluttony knows no bounds. The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom, led by an enigmatic spiritual guru named Langdon P. Hershey, warns against “what is to come” as they promote its founder’s literary oeuvre who, in this wacky alternate world, stands alongside the greats (Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf). But Hershey and his worldly eccentricities are mostly blips in the airwaves of the fictional Albertan town that commands the whole-hearted attention of Buffet Infinity, the feature debut from Simon Glassman. Composed almost exclusively of television commercials and news bulletins, Buffet Infinity stitches together a grotesquely captivating tale of consumption and capitalist monopoly, in which an unidentified sinkhole heralds the arrival of an all-you-can-eat restaurant chain at the local strip mall.

There’s a tautological excess, arguably, to the eponymous restaurant’s name, which cheekily hammers home the point: buffets, where more is always better, exploit the principle of abundance toward a hypothetical point of infinity, and why not for the absurd price of $4.99? But more literally, Buffet Infinity also charts the bizarre expansion of this establishment, whose ads glisten with the Anglo-American universality of a Shutterstock collab and whose employees have never once appeared on-site. First targeting a neighboring family-owned staple (“Jenny’s Sandwich Shop”) with informal airtime slights (to which the shop retaliates with its own slogans), the shop scales up with each new product placement, edging out the pet groomer’s, the electronics store, and — spoiler alert — Jenny herself, by offering cheaper deals, wider culinary arrays, and longer operating hours, all while a coterie of other businesses gradually find themselves under its omnipotent sway.

You could read Buffet Infinity most obviously as a glaring satire of unfettered capitalism, which would, of course, be spot-on. But Glassman and his crew of non-professional actors aren’t all mesmerized by this premise so much as they playfully toy with the possibilities of its representation, and the resultant concoctions of uncanny imagery and juxtaposition subsume the quirky small town of Westridge County under a menagerie of phantasmagoria that uniquely articulates the pleasures and perils alike of our monkey-brained attention spans. Amidst news reports of missing individuals and an eerie sound that soon blossoms into a city-level crisis, the war for our eyes and ears commences in full analog swing, with a costumed superhero battling a villain of high prices and championing savings at a car dealership, a pro-business lawyer eager to proffer his lawsuit services, an insurance spokesperson promoting her coverage plan while suffering numerous tragedies onscreen, a mattress aficionado, a fat guy with a self-esteem problem, and a pawnshop dealer and his slacker associate advertising the collateral supplies that come their way. There’s Hershey too, warning of some eternal Lovecraftian horror on the cusp of manifesting and terrorizing the collective mortal plane.

But it’s hard to mount a straightforward homily from the barrage of hokum that Glassman and co. have gleefully launched through the ether straight into our prefrontal cortexes. Cribbing from the Screenlife subgenre, albeit eschewing the interactive digital interface of our times for an old-school channel-surfing one, Buffet Infinity imagines cosmic horror as sketch comedy, a miasma of images and psychic torrents hurled at viewers of virtual and imagined communities who get inundated by their distractions and willingly immerse themselves into the slop. The ontology of infinity revolves around the paradoxical need for a boundary: in seeking monopoly and total mental control, the gastronomic entrepreneurs set up a conglomerate promoting “independent business freedom,” expanding their base franchise across several blocks and explicating the limits of their own logic. An unsuspecting young patron wanders into a backroom marked for authorized personnel only, led by a stray ball; the camera lingers way longer than it should on her doomed soul. The rest of the film’s variegated characters have bits of their “real” lives revealed in their ads, their mishaps and moments beyond the frame grafted onto it.

The surrealist tinge in these sequences befits the witching hours during which they’re ostensibly meant to be broadcast, a time when the subconscious reaches out and pulls the unseen viewer all the way in. Spelling errors are rife, and so is the queasiness that only a combination of deadpan humor and inexplicable happenings can convincingly muster. Is this all the work of aliens, Amazon, or AI? The deus ex machina reader would posit extraterrestrial incomprehensibility; the politically expedient, billionaire malice. Those more media-savvy might recall the nightmare fuel of Adult Swim’s Unedited Footage of a Bear, in which a drug ad becomes the real thing. In a way, Buffet Infinity is that work filtered through the prismatic virality of artificial stupidity, conjuring provincial nostalgia and intrigue only to repurpose these sentimental feelings in a cascade of unceasing engorgement. But we’ll never truly know. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan says, is the message, and captivation, not clarification, constitutes the film’s irresistible charm. — MORRIS YANG

Mother of Flies

Setting themselves far apart from most of the indie/DIY horror scene that focuses on squeaky exploitation thrills and slasher stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the Adams Family (no, not that one) has been quietly making their own brand of low-budget spooky stuff for years. Comprised of husband and wife John Adams and Toby Poser and their two daughters Lulu and Zelda Adams, they collaborate on almost every aspect of their homebrew filmmaking process, from writing to editing to even creating the music (mostly courtesy of their metal band H6llb6nd6r). Their films may not be the most exciting on the market, but they do tend to be more thoughtful and sometimes even more poignant that what usually hits the festival circuit.

Their latest, Mother of Flies, is no exception, though the crew may be getting to the point where it’s time to expand their horizons into something more elaborate. Here we meet Mickey (Zelda) and her obviously concerned father Jake (John), who are on their way to somewhere in upstate New York. There they hope to find Solveig (Poser), a witch who Mickey believes can cure — or at least stave off — her resurgent and likely terminal cancer. Jake is skeptical, especially when they meet the witch, who speaks in odd platitudes about death’s inevitability in nature and who lives in a giant house consumed by trees — a terrific matte composite effect, by the way — with no running water or heat or any other everyday amenities. Mickey, however, is not only willing to try anything, even this last resort, but she may be on her way to truly believing what Solveig has to offer.

Evidently taking some inspiration from the family’s own experiences with illness, Mother of Flies takes a pretty calm approach to its horror, leaving the more overtly scary elements to surface in flashbacks that fill in the blanks of Solveig’s backstory while the main narrative focuses on Mickey’s relationship with her new… let’s say, therapist. Mother and daughter of course have a relaxed but occasionally diffident chemistry, which gives their sometimes meandering conversations about mortality just the right dose of confrontation. John Adams, meanwhile, who often takes the lead in these projects, plays the earnestly worried dad well enough, but is here game for taking the backseat — this is undeniably a show for the two women. 

Mother of Flies tends to lose steam as it rolls toward a climax that you’ll see coming a mile away, but clearly the project here is an ultimately hopeful rumination on death and acceptance. If there’s genuine disappointment here, it’s that the family is so clearly capable of marshaling few resources to make resonant, visually adept, well-written genre stuff, and so hopefully this film’s success (it won a prestigious award at its festival debut at Fantasia) will lead the Adams Family to something bigger and a little bolder in the future. The results of a big budget and vast resources could produce astonishing results. — MATT LYNCH

The Serpent’s Skin

As of this writing, filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay turned 21 less than a week ago. She has also just premiered her sixth feature length film in the last four years, a remarkably sustained run of productivity, regardless of age. Unbeholden to studios and working with micro-budgets, Mackay does a lot with very little, and is also free to make her films as aggressive and political as she deems fit — not for nothing does she proclaim each of her features “a transgender film by Alice Maio Mackay.” It’s a bold statement of purpose, and a big fuck you to our socially regressive status quo that wishes to sweep anything not cis and straight under the rug. Which is not to say that Mackay’s films are dry political tracts — they are colorful, funny, sexy, brimming over with sensual pleasures. The Serpent’s Skin is Mackay’s most accomplished film yet, lush and robust thanks to the efforts of cinematographer Aaron Schuppan (a long-time collaborator who has shot all of Mackay’s features) and the aces editing of People’s Joker filmmaker Vera Drew (working on her second film in a row with Mackay). 

When we first meet Anna (Alexandra McVicker), she’s overhearing her abusive stepfather and mother arguing about her future prospects. Fed up, she leaves her small town and moves to the city to crash with her big sister, Dakota (Charlotte Chimes). Dakota introduces Anna to Danny (Jordan Dulieu), the “only hottie in the building” according to big sis. Anna and Danny have an instant connection, and quickly fall into bed together. It’s during their passionate sex that we meet Gen (Avalon Fast), who seems to have a psychic vision of the two fucking and starts to get off herself. Gen sets out to meet Anna, and finds her working at a record shop not long after Anna has repelled a violent armed robber with some hitherto unknown psychic powers of her own. It’s love at first sight for the two women, who both share the same strange powers (think Cronenberg’s Scanners, which Mackay is playfully referencing). The director seems content to follow the new couple’s burgeoning romance, following them to clubs and on a girls’ night out. 

But complications ensue when Gen tattoos a snake ouroboros symbol on Danny’s neck. Gen and Danny are both unaware at the time that they’ve each slept with Anna, and when Anna officially introduces the two of them later at a club, there’s some momentary awkwardness. But everyone here is pretty laid back about sex, and Danny winds up having a good time. After a few drinks, he politely excuses himself, goes outside, picks up a woman, and proceeds to suck out her soul. Somehow, Gen has transferred some of her psychic powers into Danny’s tattoo, which has in turn opened a door for a demon to begin plying its evil designs in our world. His victims are not dead, exactly, but appear to be husks of people — no personalities, no thoughts, just some remedial motor functions. Soon, the possessed Danny is leaving piles of bodies in his depraved wake, and Anna and Gen must stop him before he targets Dakota, this while coming to terms with what their own powers might mean.

Mackay is having a lot of fun in The Serpent’s Skin playing around with various horror iconographies. There are obvious nods to Cronenberg, but the film as a whole feels more specifically like a cross between episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, TV shows older than the filmmaker but which have lived on thanks to a couple of decades of syndication on basic cable and enduring cult status. Gen and Anna’s powers are rendered via glowing green peepers, and when they turn those powers against robbers and rapists, blood pours from eyes and noses and ears. Visions are rendered via bright flashes of rich pastel colors and layers upon layers of superimpositions, a kaleidoscopic frenzy of imagery.  But The Serpent’s Skin is not just playing a “spot the reference” game; instead, Mackay has fully integrated these inspirations into her own concerns on being trans in this often frightening modern world. The forces of evil might be aligned against our intrepid heroines, but the power of love, forgiveness, and solidarity will always save the day. A fantasy, perhaps, but an important one. There’s no one doing it quite like Alice Maio Mackay right now. — DANIEL GORMAN

Anna Kiri

A hero’s journey holds appeal not just to the outsiders who chronicle it, but also to the hero himself, for whom narration imparts structure and structure enacts justification for the road taken. The same goes for heroines, of course, and those who fancy themselves the center of their universe, i.e., anyone who does not have a depersonalization disorder. But what comes out of making this journey the very subject of cinematic study? In a way, Francis Bordeleau’s Anna Kiri exemplifies such an approach, foregrounding the inner thoughts and desires of Anna (Catherine Brunet), a delinquent with a flair for writing. But the film also falls drastically short of its ambitions, clinging onto stereotypes long enmeshed in the heroic monomyth and padding them over with the hip immediacy of many a voiceover.

Bordeleau’s second feature follows Anna, first among a ragtag group of low-level thieves led by her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotret), and then within the circles of Montreal’s up-and-coming literati. Brother and sister, we learn, were traumatized by an abusive father — raw snippets of split-second violence often surface from the recesses of her memory — and left to a life of petty crime: he a convenient anarchist, she (no less performatively) a diarist and dreamer. Alongside Cindy (Charlotte Aubin) and Mirko (Jade Hassouné), they blunder a heist, only to have a literature professor (Fayolle Jean) pick up Anna’s private journal and discover her boundless potential.

The film is quick to spotlight the inexorable hypocrisy of society at large, lampooning its caricatures of vapid, cool posturing. Ever the idealist who sees each loot of cocaine as a portal to quick luxury, Vincent justifies his gangbanging activities as a means of survival and of care for his little sister. Similarly, the gleaming intellectual world that Anna transitions into quickly comes undone by declarations of artistic credos and haughty pretensions from her newfound peers. Yet these caricatures never amount to much, and the message behind them doesn’t stick the landing. While Céline (Caroline Néron), a publishing cognoscente, sets her eyes on Anna and encourages her to publish her memories of suffering in a novel, Micky (Karl Graboshas), a nemesis from her unsightly past, reappears to collect his due, setting off a collision course between two equally fickle and volatile worlds.

There’s a grudgingly admirable punkish sensibility to Anna Kiri, whose bleak and grungy depictions of wintry Montreal are foil to an enlivened attempt at conjuring the artistic impulses that follow suburban disaffection. As it stands, however, the film’s anarchist roots end up subsumed by its bourgeois representation, with aphorisms a dime a dozen thrown into a superficial homage of French New Wave aesthetics. While Anna “Kiri,” the Québécois Anna Karina, finds her voice, her director more often than not dramatizes this search in a lazy, by-the-books way, proffering a hackneyed stab at her interiority that mostly repeats the tired and whimsical tropes popular at the height of the Sundance Noughties. “The problem with finding someone too beautiful too long,” Anna jots somewhere in her folio of life, is that “we end up destroying them. Because beauty is unbearable over time.” So, too, are farce and frivolity. — MORRIS YANG

The Virgin of Quarry Lake

Taking place within Argentina’s great depression in 2001, Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is an intriguing effort at blending various styles, themes, and points of entry, and it’s due to her control over tone and composition that it’s a mostly successful enterprise. Teenager Natalia, along with two of her closest friends, all seem to have raging crushes on their childhood friend Diego, and this precarious scenario is yet further ruptured one hot summer when a cool older woman, Silvia, begins to seduce Diego. At the same time, a homeless man is beaten outside Natalia’s home, and leaves his cart of belongings there, dripping with what seems to be blood. Natalia comes to see this as a curse, perhaps manifesting itself in the form of Silvia, and she begins to exhibit an aggressive form of witchcraft to exert her will over the world. 

There are a few extremely abrasive moments of surprise violence among the otherwise fairly muted story, including a shocking hit-and-run. But thanks to Casabé’s careful handling, alongside a savvy script by Benjamin Naishtat, these moments land as intended, heightening our awareness that Natalia, while suffering from the understandable throes of teenage jealousy and intensity, is capable of inflicting true horrors all her own. Naishat makes use of this volatile political and economic moment in Argentina to ratchet the tension even higher, as power outages run rampant and the news media turns hysterical. 2001 also reflects a particular moment in the evolution of the Internet, and so the teens are seen communicating via AIM chats accessed at dimly-lit Internet cafes. More than mere period reference, however, this time capsule texture provides further layers of specificity to those coming of age in this time and place, all of them struggling to make sense of the larger world and themselves at the same time. 

Still, there are times when The Virgin of Quarry Lake’s hazy aesthetic risks downshifting the momentum, even in a film that barely pushes past 90 minutes. Dolores Oliverio, the newcomer who plays Natalia, is deeply expressive and certainly holds the camera’s attention with the appropriate force, but there are some choices Casabé makes — including an over-reliance on using animal noises in the sound design to signify Natalia’s inner turmoil, as well as a finale that somehow feels not gory enough, where one senses the director’s fear to push even further — that suggest a slight weakness in imagination. Still, some small qualms aside, The Virgin of Quarry Lake is an effective work of storytelling that fruitfully captures the curdling rage of growing up as the world around you burns. — JAKE PITRE

$Positions

Writer/director Brandon Daley is juggling a couple of very disparate tones in his new film $POSITIONS, an absurdist comedy that gradually transforms into a white-knuckle thriller about being poor in America in 2025. That he is able to pull this off is thanks in no small part to Michael Kunicki, a hugely talented, ingratiating performer whose expressionistic face displays an uncanny ability to smile in both happy and terrified ways. Kunicki plays small-town loser Mike Alvarado; we first meet him begging a receptionist to give him an extension on his brother Vinny’s (Vinny Kress) past-due hospital bills. Vinny is developmentally disabled, but their father’s health insurance has lapsed and the care Vinny needs has been cut off. Desperate, Mike takes Vinny to work with him, leaving him in the employee breakroom while he sneaks off to his desk and pretends that he wasn’t late. 

Right off the bat, then, Daley is situating his characters in a very specific cultural and socioeconomic milieu: middle-Americans caught up in cycles of debt and low pay and a severely lacking social safety net. So it’s something of a miracle when Mike checks his crypto app and sees that his latest investment has spiked upwards of $30,000. He is elated, overwhelmed with joy, and so, of course, in the first of his many, many bad decisions, he immediately quits his job, buys his now former coworkers some expensive catering, and asks his long-suffering girlfriend Charlene (Kaylyn Carter) if she would be interested in an open relationship. But like stock market investing but on steroids, the peaks and valleys of crypto are wildly unpredictable, and before he knows it, his investment has bottomed out. He’s back to having nothing. 

And so begins a roller coaster ride of Mike’s wildly vacillating fortunes, driving him insane in the process. Mike’s elderly, alcoholic father has a horrific accident — caused in large part by Mike giving him weed gummies as a substitute for booze — landing him in the hospital and quickly accumulating more medical debt. We then meet Mike’s cousin, Travis (Trevor Dawkins), a recovering addict fresh out of prison who Mike ropes into his scheme. For her part, Charlene agrees to the open relationship and quickly lands a lover, which horrifies Mike. Mike and Vinny also organize a yard sale to raise money for their dad’s treatments, but somehow get talked into selling the actual house, forcing them to move in with Travis and his young daughter. 

In other words, it’s all absurd, although tinged with just enough verisimilitude to function as broadly realistic. Mike is a fount of good humor and boundless enthusiasm; each setback is met with a simple determination to try again until he gets it right. Daley clearly charts Mike’s gradual deterioration, where the debts mount up so much that even his cheerful façade begins to crumble. Of course, Mike is a gambling addict, facilitated by the ease of pressing buttons on a smartphone. It’s the gamification of addiction; as journalist Patrick Redford has written, “young people today live in a country… actively receding away from them. If they are lucky enough to get into a position to rack up six figures of student debt, they face bleak job prospects and prohibitively expensive housing costs… so why not play the viral lottery? Why not start gambling? Why not get involved in cryptocurrency speculation?” Sports fans in particular know how quickly legalized gambling has become embraced by the leagues which once shunned it as anathema to the game, while DraftKings and FanDuel spend millions of dollars on advertising and sponsorships that legitimizes them in the eyes of unsuspecting potential victims. 

None of this is to say that Daley has his eye on a simple polemic; $POSITIONS is frequently hilarious, full of non-sequiturs and tomfoolery, almost like a long-lost Happy Madison production. Until, that is, the last act, when Mike finally hits it big to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The only problem is that someone has stolen his computer and external hard drive, and Mike can’t access his crypto wallet to sell high without them. Mike ruins several lives in his quest to find his stuff, his long journey into darkness punctuated by his phone app charting the real time progress of his fortune. So close yet so far away is the new normal in America, and $POSITIONS leaps headfirst and sometimes literally into this cruel reality. — DANIEL GORMAN