The so-called “crackberry” is back.
IFC Films has released the first official trailer for the upcoming comedy-drama film, “BlackBerry,” which provides a peek into exactly how the handheld device revolutionized the cell phone industry.
Director Matt Johnson, along with co-screenwriter Matthew Miller, adapted Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” for the big screen.
Johnson plays BlackBerry co-founder Douglas Fregin in the film, alongside Glenn Howerton as chair and co-ceo Jim Balsillie, Jay Baruchel as co-founder Mike Lazaridis and Cary Elwes as Palm CEO Carl Yankowski. The cast also includes Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside, Rich Sommer, Michelle Giroux, Mark Critch and SungWon Cho.
The trailer gives a first look at Johnson and Baruchel as Doug and Mike, who discover an untapped wireless signal in North America which leads them to developing the first-ever mobile device...
IFC Films has released the first official trailer for the upcoming comedy-drama film, “BlackBerry,” which provides a peek into exactly how the handheld device revolutionized the cell phone industry.
Director Matt Johnson, along with co-screenwriter Matthew Miller, adapted Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” for the big screen.
Johnson plays BlackBerry co-founder Douglas Fregin in the film, alongside Glenn Howerton as chair and co-ceo Jim Balsillie, Jay Baruchel as co-founder Mike Lazaridis and Cary Elwes as Palm CEO Carl Yankowski. The cast also includes Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside, Rich Sommer, Michelle Giroux, Mark Critch and SungWon Cho.
The trailer gives a first look at Johnson and Baruchel as Doug and Mike, who discover an untapped wireless signal in North America which leads them to developing the first-ever mobile device...
- 3/15/2023
- by Charna Flam
- Variety Film + TV
An epic rise and fall for a once-ubiquitous mobile device is chronicled in the first trailer for IFC Films’ BlackBerry.
The fact-based feature from director Matt Johnson stars Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, co-founder of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, and Glenn Howerton as the company’s former co-ceo Jim Balsillie. The trailer shows immediate tension between the pair, with Lazaridis being warned before agreeing to work with Balsillie that he is a shark.
The footage includes Howerton telling Baruchel, “I know how to market it, and I know who we can sell it to, but I want 50 percent of the company, and I’ve got to be CEO.” Surprisingly, Baruchel’s character is good with this arrangement.
Later, Howerton’s Balsillie says, “We are in a race to get this thing to market, and we are a year behind — I need a prototype.”
Another pivotal scene shows Lazaridis, played by Baruchel,...
The fact-based feature from director Matt Johnson stars Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, co-founder of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, and Glenn Howerton as the company’s former co-ceo Jim Balsillie. The trailer shows immediate tension between the pair, with Lazaridis being warned before agreeing to work with Balsillie that he is a shark.
The footage includes Howerton telling Baruchel, “I know how to market it, and I know who we can sell it to, but I want 50 percent of the company, and I’ve got to be CEO.” Surprisingly, Baruchel’s character is good with this arrangement.
Later, Howerton’s Balsillie says, “We are in a race to get this thing to market, and we are a year behind — I need a prototype.”
Another pivotal scene shows Lazaridis, played by Baruchel,...
- 3/15/2023
- by Ryan Gajewski
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In BlackBerry, the rise of a blue-chip tech company sets the stage for the dissolution of a longstanding friendship. Sound familiar? Just wait ‘til you hear the score. Directed by Matt Johnson, it tells the true story of Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, software engineers who founded the company Rim in the mid-80s and later invented a cellphone that could handle email. The film begins on the day when they meet Jim Basillie (Glenn Howerton), a Rottweiler who, alongside Lazaridis’ genius, turned Rim’s invention (only later christened BlackBerry) into the world’s most ubiquitous mobile device––at least for a time.
Johnson, who also stars as the amiable Fregin opposite Jay Baruchel’s introverted Lazaridis, is the Canadian director behind Operation Avalanche––a film that seamlessly blended documentary aesthetics with newsreel footage to tell the story of how the CIA (and not quite Stanley Kubrick) maybe faked the moon landing.
Johnson, who also stars as the amiable Fregin opposite Jay Baruchel’s introverted Lazaridis, is the Canadian director behind Operation Avalanche––a film that seamlessly blended documentary aesthetics with newsreel footage to tell the story of how the CIA (and not quite Stanley Kubrick) maybe faked the moon landing.
- 2/18/2023
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Is there anything worse than becoming obsolete? It’s a fear many share — to be slowly forgotten and discarded, left on a proverbial roadside as the rest of the world continues to innovate at pace around us. It isn’t just a business concern, but a human one: the innate craving for relevancy in a world where something or someone shinier than you is always around the corner.
The BlackBerry, with its distinctive Qwerty click-click keypad, met a sobering fate when it faded into quiet obscurity in the past decade — going from having a 43 percent market share in 2010 to zero percent just six years later — and when it was announced that a film charting the smartphone’s rise and fall had landed a Berlinale competition slot, one’s initial thoughts were: oh, that old thing?
But “BlackBerry,” which follows Canadian software company Research in Motion and the mistakes made by...
The BlackBerry, with its distinctive Qwerty click-click keypad, met a sobering fate when it faded into quiet obscurity in the past decade — going from having a 43 percent market share in 2010 to zero percent just six years later — and when it was announced that a film charting the smartphone’s rise and fall had landed a Berlinale competition slot, one’s initial thoughts were: oh, that old thing?
But “BlackBerry,” which follows Canadian software company Research in Motion and the mistakes made by...
- 2/17/2023
- by Steph Green
- Indiewire
The entrance and exit of the BlackBerry smartphone is truly an all-thumbs tale – that of a beloved keyboard on a game-changing wireless device, and a Canadian company (Research in Motion) not terribly dexterous with innovation after the market pie went from “CrackBerry”-flavored to Apple-forward.
Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-ceo Jim Balsillie.
The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world,...
Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-ceo Jim Balsillie.
The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world,...
- 2/17/2023
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
The Sonar Network, Canada's award-winning independent podcast network, rings in its third annual 12-hour livestream comedy marathon on Sunday, December 11th from 12pm to midnight Et.
The Sonar Network, first launched in 2017, celebrates its 5th Anniversary year with the return of this beloved, ambitious, and ridiculous tradition. The marathon will feature fan-favourite segments from some of Canada’s most acclaimed comedians, including Mark Little (CBC’s Mr. D), Chris Sandiford (Netflix’s God’s Favorite Idiot), Jay McCarrol (Nirvanna the Band the Show), Cathryn Naiker (CBC’s Run The Burbs), Hisham Kelati (Juno Award nominee for Comedy Album of the Year 2022), Kris Siddiqi, Jan Caruana (Mean Girls), Paul Bates (Second City; Best Male Improvisor - Now Magazine), Alessandra Vite, and Winnipeg/Toronto-based sketch comedy troupe Hunks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkG8IdwoYQM
The event comes hot on the heels of The Sonar Network’s impressive 8-award win at the...
The Sonar Network, first launched in 2017, celebrates its 5th Anniversary year with the return of this beloved, ambitious, and ridiculous tradition. The marathon will feature fan-favourite segments from some of Canada’s most acclaimed comedians, including Mark Little (CBC’s Mr. D), Chris Sandiford (Netflix’s God’s Favorite Idiot), Jay McCarrol (Nirvanna the Band the Show), Cathryn Naiker (CBC’s Run The Burbs), Hisham Kelati (Juno Award nominee for Comedy Album of the Year 2022), Kris Siddiqi, Jan Caruana (Mean Girls), Paul Bates (Second City; Best Male Improvisor - Now Magazine), Alessandra Vite, and Winnipeg/Toronto-based sketch comedy troupe Hunks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkG8IdwoYQM
The event comes hot on the heels of The Sonar Network’s impressive 8-award win at the...
- 12/9/2022
- Podnews.net
For all the criticism the found footage genre gets, like many a well-worn structure, there is still room to build. Operation Avalanche, from Matt Johnson and Josh Boles (The Dirties), aims to do just that and succeeds, for the most part.
In the late 60s, four young C.I.A. agents convince their superiors to send them undercover at Nasa, posing as a documentary film crew. Soon they learn that the mission to the moon is in jeopardy of pushing past 1969, thus faltering on JFK’s famed promise. Led by the ambitious Matt (Johnson), the “film crew” conspires to fake the moon landing.
Perhaps the most famous of all American conspiracy theories, Johnson and Boles’ docu-style rendering of the non-event feels confident and quick. These filmmakers have a knack for pacing, readily cutting out any fat from a given scene to keep the proceedings raw and gripping.
And yet, there is plenty to gripe about,...
In the late 60s, four young C.I.A. agents convince their superiors to send them undercover at Nasa, posing as a documentary film crew. Soon they learn that the mission to the moon is in jeopardy of pushing past 1969, thus faltering on JFK’s famed promise. Led by the ambitious Matt (Johnson), the “film crew” conspires to fake the moon landing.
Perhaps the most famous of all American conspiracy theories, Johnson and Boles’ docu-style rendering of the non-event feels confident and quick. These filmmakers have a knack for pacing, readily cutting out any fat from a given scene to keep the proceedings raw and gripping.
And yet, there is plenty to gripe about,...
- 1/25/2016
- by Dan Mecca
- The Film Stage
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