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The \u201cBarbenheimer\u201d effect will feature prominently in every film critic\u2019s review of 2023. But it\u2019s also been quite a year for a very specific type of workplace drama.<\/p>\n
Air (trainers), Tetris (video game), and The Beanie Baby (soft toy) all tried to find suspense and comedy in the launch of a hit consumer product.<\/p>\n
BlackBerry, an irreverent account of the rise and sudden demise of the titular smartphone, is the latest example. It\u2019s also the most successful.<\/p>\n
The story begins in 1996 with a gang of Canadian nerds goofing around in an industrial estate in Waterloo, Ontario.<\/p>\n
Tech company Research In Motion is run by softly spoken CEO Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), a brilliant engineer, a terrible manager, and an even worse businessman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
His nominal second-in-command is best pal Doug Fregin (amusingly played by the film\u2019s writer-director Matt Johnson) who sees an office as a place to play video games with like-minded geeks.<\/p>\n
But they share a dream bestowed upon them by a high school teacher who said: \u201cThe person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world\u201d.<\/p>\n
And when Research In Motion starts developing a smartphone, their teacher\u2019s prophetic quote is the dramatic finale to their cringeworthy funding pitch.<\/p>\n
Their potential investor is the short-tempered Jim Balsillie (a brilliant Glenn Howerton) who works for an engineering firm.<\/p>\n
Shortly after throwing them out of his office, Jim loses it with his boss and gets fired. He needs a life raft and wonders if the geeks\u2019 idea could hold water. A deal sees Jim become \u201cjoint CEO\u201d with Mike and the only grown up in the office.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Jim orders the team to make a prototype he can show to telecoms company Bell Atlantic.<\/p>\n
Using a calculator, a TV remote, a Nintendo Game Boy, and a Speak & Spell, Mike knocks up the first working BlackBerry in one night.<\/p>\n
Despite leaving it in the back of a taxi on the way to the meeting, a deal is done and the clickety-click of the BlackBerry keyboard becomes a defining sound of the Noughties. But the fairytale ends when Steve Jobs releases the button-free iPhone.<\/p>\n
Pacy, well-acted, and brilliantly written, this boardroom farce pushes all right the buttons.<\/p>\n
BlackBerry, Cert 15, In cinemas now<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] The \u201cBarbenheimer\u201d effect will feature prominently in every film critic\u2019s review of 2023. But it\u2019s also been quite a year for a very specific type of workplace drama. Air (trainers), Tetris (video game), and The Beanie Baby (soft toy) all tried to find suspense and comedy in the launch of a hit consumer product. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[765],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}