A new film shows how the smartphone market went through BlackBerry’s hands
Black Berry: The Rise and Fall of a Smartphone-Like Company (The Relic), An Even-Ran (The Thing People Used Before the iPhone)
It is now a relic. An also-ran. Or, as one character puts it in BlackBerry, a new movie about the early smartphone empire’s rise and fall, it’s merely “the thing people used before they used the iPhone.” This comedy makes plain thatBlackBerry is more than just a cautionary tale. Tech culture, as we know it today, took root, bloomed, and died on the vine.
The movie doesn’t entirely sustain that tension or sense of surprise to the finish; even if you don’t know exactly how it all went down in real life, it’s not hard to see where things are headed. The company is in hot water around the time Apple is about to launch its much- anticipated iPhone. That marks the beginning of the end, and it’s fascinating to watch as BlackBerry goes into its downward spiral. It’s a stinging reminder that success and failure often go together, hand in thumb-scrolling hand.
The Movie Nirvanna The Band the Show: From the Lost Ark to Research In Motion, starring Jim Balsillie and Glenn Howerton
It begins in 1996, when Research In Motion is just a small, scrappy company hawking modems in Waterloo, Ontario. The brains of the operation are played by Jay Baruchel and he is a tech whiz. His partner is a headband-wearing, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-loving goofball named Douglas Fregin, played by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote and directed the movie.
Johnson’s script returns us to an era of VHS tapes and dial-up internet, when the mere idea of a phone that could handle emails — let alone games, music and other applications — was unimaginable. Glenn Howerton’s character in it’s always sunny is playing a sleazy investor named Jim Balsillie, who Mike and Doug are trying to convince him to buy.
The time frame shifts to the early 2000s, with Research In Motion now based in a slick new office, with a private jet at its disposal. But the mix of personalities is as volatile as ever — sometimes they gel, but more often they clash.
Mike is now co- CEO and he remains a shy-yet-stubborn perfectionist who always tinkers with new improvements to theBlackBerry, refusing to abandon manufacturing operations to China. Jim is a Machiavellian dealmaker who does one outrageous stunt after another, whether he’s trying to buy a National Hockey League team and move it to Ontario or hiring a top design team to work on it. That leaves Doug on the outside looking in, trying to boost staff morale with Raiders of the Lost Ark movie nights and maintain the geeky good vibes of the company he started years earlier.
As a director, Johnson captures all this in-house tension with an energetic handheld camera and a jagged editing style. He also makes heavy use of a pulsing synth score that’s ideally suited to a tech industry continually in flux.
For Johnson, pop culture is a kind of lingua franca. His cult web series turned Viceland sitcom Nirvanna the Band the Show, is riven with references and extended homages: to the Criterion Collection, Nintendo’s Wii Shop Wednesday, the rollerblading sequence set to a Prodigy track in the 1995 film Hackers. But more than a pop encyclopedia, Johnson is also a deft prober of the nerd pathology. In his feature debut, 2013’s The Dirties, he plays an alienated high schooler avenging himself on his bullies by plotting a school shooting, under the auspice of making a student film about a school shooting. It’s hard to sell school shooting comedy. But Johnson committed to the premise with verve, humor, and considerable intelligence, revealing how certain dorky defense mechanisms (from pop culture obsessiveness to irony) can curdle into out-and-out psychopathy.
If Balsillie saysBallsley, not Ball-silly, he sees the corporate devil on his shoulder as Doug Fregin, his friend and co-worker. Johnson imagined that Doug was a goober who wore glasses and a David Foster Wallace headband. He compares Wi-Fi signals to the Force in Star Wars, pays for business lunches with cash pried out of a velcro Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet, and uses “Glengarry Glen Ross” as a verb.
A Case Study in Waterloo, Ontario: The Story of a “Presy Inspired by our Lawyers” (The Phone is not a Cell Phone)
The title card of the film tells you that the story is inspired by real people and events in Waterloo, Ontario. The film’s director and cowriter, Matt Johnson, is happy about it, as he describes it as a “Presy designed by our lawyers.” The film is important because it is located in a sleepy town about an hour and a half from Toronto.
Waterloo and the surrounding area were better known for their farmer’s market culture and horse-drawn buggies before Research in Motion changed the area into a tech hub.
With Lazaridis’ ability to exploit existing wireless infrastructure, and Balsillie’s command of boardroom politics, the pair invent, and cannily market, the modern smartphone. In an effort to call attention to the device, Balsillie has his sales force take them to fancy restaurants and private clubs in order to talk loudly on their cell phones. “It’s not a cell phone,” he insists. It is a status symbol.
