6/4/2023 0 Comments Fall of icarusThat doesn’t quite happen, but Jim does become co-CEO, along with Mike. Jim is, to put it bluntly, a jerk, who finds himself fired soon after and offers to join Research in Motion for 50% of the company and the insistence that he be CEO. The meeting goes poorly when Jim Balsillie (an unrecognizable Glenn Howerton) shoots down the duo’s idea for what we’d think of now as a smartphone. It’s nerd heaven, with staff morale outpacing earnings by a long distance. Mike attends this meeting with Doug Fregin, played by Johnson, a headband-wearing nerd who lives for Movie Night at Research in Motion, the company he and Mike founded. Jay Baruchel plays Mike as the prototypical driven genius, so hyper-focused on details that minutes before the biggest meeting of his life, in 1996, he has to rewire an intercom speaker because its humming distracts him. Why Allison Rodriguez joined 12 News: 'What's not to love' about Arizona? What is 'BlackBerry' about? But it still must gnaw at Mike Lazaridis, who created the BlackBerry, every time he sees someone use an iPhone. If you can count cashing out for millions and even billions of dollars a dashed future, I suppose. But the BlackBerry fell even faster than it rose, dashing friendships and futures along the way. The once near-ubiquitous device was designed as a “pager, a cellphone and an email machine all in one,” one of the people who helped create it says in the gripping, exciting and kind of sad “BlackBerry,” a film about the rise and fall of what at the time seemed like a sci-fi miracle come to life.Īnd if that description sounds quaint, just wait for the real-life footage co-writer and director Matt Johnson slips into the film of Oprah Winfrey introducing it to her amped-up TV audience. Probably a few years after BlackBerry exploded. When did having the once-unfathomable computer power formerly reserved for rooms full of hardware at an IBM facility fit into your pocket become expected? Ho-hum, even? When did you start taking your smartphone for granted? View Gallery: See Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in 'BlackBerry'
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