BlackBerry (Matt Johnson, 2023) (Patreon)

I always try to give my subscriber base their (your) money's worth. But every so often a film comes along that just makes next to no impression on me. I would be hard-pressed to say anything especially insightful about BlackBerry, and that's mostly because Matt Johnson's script and direction are so aggressively mediocre that there's very little to discuss. An analysis would probably just look like Syd Field transpotting. "Oh, here's an insignificant detail that will have a rueful callback." "Here's where Balsillie's hubris tanks the company for good." "Here's where Lazaridis's wounded nerd pride torpedoes RIM's last chance to survive." "Here is where the King dismisses the Jester, sealing his fate."

I suppose an allegorical reading is possible, since there is something half-assed about the whole film, in a way that perhaps speaks to Canada's inferiority complex. This is a major motion picture, but it tries too hard, with its nonstop movie quotes and Jay Baruchel's twitching and mumbling and Glenn Howerton overplaying the corporate badass. BlackBerry must have seemed like a sea change in Canadian consciousness. At long last, the fulcrum of advanced technology was in the hands of the hard-working people of Waterloo, instead of the ostentatious Silicon Valley fat-cats. Like BlackBerry itself, BlackBerry misreads the room and its reach sorely exceeds its grasp.

One final note: I hope that eventually someone more enterprising than me decides to make a supercut of BlackBerry, Steve Jobs, and maybe The Social Network, integrating all the events into the proper timeline. A sort of tech-nerd Super Olympics where specific errors (bad branding, clunky user-unfriendliness) can be juxtaposed with their solutions. Then again, that might just make one longer, stupider movie.

Sorry, one more thing. A "freegan" is a vegan who only eats what they glean from the trash. This isn't, however, as thematically on-the-nose as Jim's surname pronunciation scene. "Is it ball-SILLY?" "No. BALLS-ily."