Moviegoers on the lookout for a wholesome dose of comedy, chaos and Canadiana gained’t need to look a lot additional than BlackBerry, a hilarious new film that tells the story of how Waterloo’s personal Research in Motion took over the cellphone market and simply as swiftly crashed and burned.
From begin to end, BlackBerry takes you on a chaotic experience that can make you doubt the competence of tech bros and enterprise capitalists alike, who’re usually trusted with thousands and thousands of {dollars} and stewarding the know-how that runs the world.
But irrespective of how cobbled collectively the unique BlackBerry was, this film will nonetheless make you marvel on the sheer will of the Canadians that innovated and marketed their solution to the highest, and created the smartphone business as we all know it at the moment. It’s a surprisingly entertaining story that can make you snigger greater than you had been anticipating.
Jay Baruchel performs BlackBerry founder Mike Lazaridis as a quiet tech visionary that’s all hunched shoulders and anxious perfectionism. Alongside his goofy sidekick co-founder Doug Fregin, performed by the movie’s director Matt Johnson, the pair handle to slap collectively the primary working telephone and e mail machine — in between film nights and online game tournaments.
Then, Jim Balsillie, performed by Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame, steps in to whip the infantile bunch right into a multi-million greenback firm — satisfied he can yell his solution to a functioning group.
Baruchel, greatest recognized for his comedy, takes a brand new tack on this dramatic position, and it undoubtedly fits him. In an interview with Global News, the actor revealed that the story of BlackBerry is close to and expensive to his coronary heart as a Canadian who grew up within the Nineties.
“It’s a bit of a love letter to a time and place that we came of age,” Baruchel stated, revealing that plenty of the ’90s paraphernalia that peppered the set got here from the director’s personal home.
This is Johnson’s largest movie but. As an indie director from Toronto, he advised Global News he was on a mission to get Canada extra recognition.
“For us, as kind-of patriots, we thought, ‘Oh wouldn’t it be cool to really try to plant a flag on the invention of the smartphone for this country?’” Johnson stated, “Make a film that’s broad enough and accessible enough that Americans and people around the world can see it and be like, ‘Oh wow, I can’t believe the Canadians did something.’”
Johnson added that American star Howerton didn’t know that BlackBerry was a Canadian model earlier than coming into the movie. The It’s Always Sunny actor advised Global News that Johnson made him take a “Canad proficiency test before casting him.
“Do you speak the language?” Howerton joked. “Do you know the structure of our government?” he added, as Baruchel and Johnson laughed.
The three males had been boisterous and filled with quips throughout their interview, pertaining to how an expletive-fuelled Baruchel was nervous nobody would wish to watch a film set in late ’90s Waterloo, and the way Howerton had the crew of BlackBerry strolling on eggshells round him as a result of his pseudo-method-acting course of.
(You can watch the interview in full, high.)
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‘BlackBerry’ will probably be launched in theatres throughout Canada on May 12.
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