![]() Mike, who sports a prematurely gray swoosh of hair and big chunky glasses, is an unimpressive pitchman for his own product. ![]() Johnson also plays RIM’s co-founder Douglas Fregin, an intermittently lovable goof who runs his company like a clubhouse for nerds, screening movies for employees while his business partner, Mike Lazaridis (played by Jay Baruchel), tinkers in the background. A similarly quirky sensibility is reflected in his portrayal of Research in Motion, the Waterloo, Ontario, tech upstart that created the BlackBerry smartphone in the late ’90s and briefly crested to the top of the market before being swept under by the arrival of the iPhone and Android. It’s fittingly told by the Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, one of the country’s finest indie bards, whose oeuvre includes the micro-budget thriller The Dirties and the conspiracy thriller Operation Avalanche. BlackBerry instead tells the tale of a rise and fall: a technological revolution that ended up as a historical blip.Ī small business ballooning into enormous success, being surprised by its own good fortune, and then struggling to outsmart the sharks around it is a very Canadian narrative: that of a well-liked underdog that nevertheless gets steamrolled. These films are usually about famed pioneers such as Facebook and Apple. Want to see a movie where character actors actually get to have whole conversations without a caped hero bursting through a wall? Well, here’s the origin story of a world-famous shoe or a best-selling video game. The “business biopic” is Hollywood’s subgenre du jour, a way to sneak dramas for grown-ups into theaters by building them around brand-name products that everyone recognizes.
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