If you enjoyed Ben Affleck’s “Air,” currently in theatres, but felt that it was too puffed up, here comes a lesson in deflation. Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” is a reminder that, in dramatic terms, rise and fall is almost always more gripping, and more morally provoking, than rise and rise. For those who were offplanet, or awaiting conception, at the dawn of the millennium, the title may need some explanation. A BlackBerry was a portable communication device, equipped with buttons so itty-bitty that they could not be comfortably deployed by anybody larger than Rumpelstiltskin. Nonetheless, for a while, owning a BlackBerry was all the rage. It could slot into a holster on your belt, allowing you to draw it like a Colt and fire off a lethal message to that guy with the goatee in Accounts.
Johnson shows us how the rage began. Not content with directing the new film, and writing it with Matthew Miller, he also stars as Doug Fregin, one of the creators of the BlackBerry, and, if the movie is to be believed, the most committed wearer of a headband since John McEnroe. (Summoned to a business meeting, Doug keeps his headband on even while clad in a suit.) Doug and his thirtysomething pal Mike Lazaridis ( Jay Baruchel)—whose hair is gray from the outset, as if sapped of color by the power of the adjacent brain—are the co-founders of a small Canadian outfit called Research in Motion. Has corporate nomenclature ever been more dazzlingly dull?
Denne historien er fra May 15, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra May 15, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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THE SIGHTED WORLD
Growing up with the writer Ved Mehta.
QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.