BlackBerry review: A true cautionary tale, told in succession

dirty: In 1996 a team of Canadian engineers had a brilliant idea – a portable box that not only makes phone calls but also sends email…but has no idea how to run an actual company. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you think about it, they stumbled across a shark in a business suit named Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who didn’t immediately see the potential in their fledgling device, but as soon as he did, pounced on an opportunity to bring it to market. .

And so the tragic tale Black Berry Founders of Research in Motion were swept up in the game-changing smartphone success Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Douglas Fregin (Matt Johnson, who also directs) say Mike attempts to develop a business edge as co-CEO with Jim, while Doug proves to be a baby in The heart is no match for the growing demands of a successful technology company. Technology issues, a hostile takeover attempt, and Jim’s shady business practices threaten to bring down the company, but are unsuccessful; However, there’s a guy named Steve Jobs in Cupertino who has a great new idea…

To get things done (TM): Hard to top social network, when it comes to stories of tech savvy and commercial wrongdoing, if you’re not David Fincher and/or Aaron Sorkin. Goal Black Berry It bears a blunt portrait of the BlackBerry’s predecessors as well as its eventual decline, with cinematographer Jared Raab praising the film’s documentary approach to photography. Succession to maintain kinetic movement.

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This is a very important thing to note, since the action here is pretty much just guys talking business deals or handing over data packets. In order to show what made the BlackBerry device so revolutionary, Johnson and Matthew Miller’s text has to seriously delve into the details of what it meant to transmit information wirelessly in 1996 and beyond; Here in the days of reliable LTE or 5G cellular service anywhere in the world, it’s a little hard to remember the days when networks were regularly overloaded by far too many users.

(Anyone who attended SXSW from 2008-2010 will likely remember watching AT&T subscribers with iPhones stroll outside the Austin Convention Center, hoping to get a signal despite the crowds of other AT&T subscribers who surrounded them.)

As for Johnson and Miller, we were actually able to explain the technical aspects of the story in a way that makes it clear, even if you don’t understand the details, that Mike Lazaridis was ahead of his time solving the biggest technical problem. Obstacles to digital messaging. It’s a huge factor in the film’s strength, because once we believe in Mike’s genius, his eventual descent into demise becomes all the more tragic; A brilliant man, his greatest weakness is the inability to see the real problem right in front of him.

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BlackBerry (IFC Films)