The right call
Isn’t autumn brilliant? The kids are back at school, we’ve stopped moaning about the weather, and cinemas are showing films like Blackberry. With blockbuster summer over and Oscar-baiting winter a few weeks away, it’s time for ambitious mid-budget dramas.
Octobers past have yielded The Death Of Stalin, First Man and Sicario – films that topped lists of my favourite films of their years.
Blackberry, an irreverent account of the birth of the titular smartphone, is another film that makes no concessions to teenage fads or award-panel worthiness.
The story begins in 1996 in the scruffy office of Canadian tech firm Research In Motion.
The boss is founder Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), a brilliant engineer and a terrible businessman. His nominal second-in-command is best pal Doug Fregin (amusingly played by the film’s writer-director Matt Johnson) who sees the office as the perfect place to play video games with like-minded geeks.
But their world is turned upside down when Mike strikes a deal with an investor with a one-amp fuse.
Jim Balsillie (a very funny Glenn Howerton) buys into the company after Mike pitches his revolutionary idea for turning a mobile phone into a mobile office.
Jim’s first move is to order a prototype, which Mike knocks together using a calculator, a Nintendo Game Boy and a Speak & Spell, and promptly loses in the back of the cab.
A telecoms network still buys into the dream and the clickety click of the Blackberry keyboard becomes one of the defining sounds of the Noughties. But, after its runaway success, the story jumps to the year 2007 to show how everyone at Research In Motion massively underestimated Steve Jobs’s iphone.
Thankfully, Johnson pushes all the right buttons with a fascinating, funny, surprisingly pacy drama about blokes who work in IT.
A fascinating, funny and surprisingly pacy drama about blokes working in IT