This Isn't Really About Hit 2023 Biopic Blackberry

Disclaimer: I am a bit sick and out of it while writing this, so it will be more fun and interesting compared to the rest of my blogs

Okay, I lied, it's kinda about hit biopic Blackberry (2023) still from rogerebert.com

The Blackberry (the technology) is kinda a relic of a time I have no concept of. I was born six months before the iPhone was announced, and it's first release in June 2007 was a month before my first birthday. I've basically never known a world without the iPhone bar those that exist in movies I love; Naked Lunch, Nowhere, Twister, all of these are set in a "before time" of both the iPhone and the Blackberry, the latter having released first in January of 1999. A time where communication was clunky and stationary, to make a call you needed a phone, often a landline or a phonebox. This issue drives tension in a story, "we need to find a phone" is now "we need a signal" as the nature of communication shifts from grounded to mobile. This shift was a wrench is a lot of storytelling conventions, you could easily get a short message to someone in seconds, not mail or telegraph needed.

The Blackberry Bold (Wikipedia) For those who have no clue what I'm talking about. It's a cell phone, used to be a pager, watch the movie for better understanding.

There is an 8 year span in which Blackberries existed without the iPhone, and these eight years plus a few more are covered in Matt Johnson's biopic Blackberry released in 2023. Now you might be thinking "Surya Quentacinema talking positively about Biopics? What Has the World Come To?" Here me out, or moreso hear out Matt Johnson, who is currently in the news as director of hit film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which is one of the best comedies I've seen probably ever. Many a good friends of mine (two people) recommended expanding into Johnson's other works (The Dirties, Operation Avalanche) which are all very good and I'd highly recommend. Many of Johnson's previous works are concerned with the act on filmmaking, and how it can destroy you and your relationships. Of course that is a very broad and vague sentiment but I find that to be the thread of connection.

Blackberry is kinda an outlier in Matt Johnson's work (or at least for now, his upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony releases this year i think) but it still follows themes of creative destruction of self in the broader sense of a creator as opposed to specifically a filmmaker. You can see the visual fingerprints of his previous works, which are more in line with mockumentaries, in both The Dirties and Operation Avalanche he is playing himself "Matt Johnson" the high school filmmaker, and "Matt Johnson" the CIA agent. This formula of kinda playing himself-but-not-himself is really interesting to me in the text of the film, how all these Matt Johnson's are probably kinda splinters of the Real Guy Matt Johnson, and how that motivates the film and the characters. Johnson also plays a character in Blackberry, Doug Fregin, co-founder of Research in Motion (the company that eventually becomes Blackberry.)

The film Blackberry centers around the rise and fall of the Blackberry and a technology as well as the people who made it, in a fast paced pseudo-Social Network vibe, to me it is Social Network but good.

Most of the film is focused on the warring personalities of Mike Lazaridis, Doug Fregin, and Jim Ballsillie. Lazaridis and Fregin are childhood best friends and at the start of the film they have the sort of relationship you see between the shy and the outspoken on the playground, two halfs of a whole. Fregin speaks up for Lazaridis, who leans more soft-spoken and is too caught up in trying to make the perfect product. Ballsillie is similar in that sense to Fregin, an instigator, so when he falls into their lives it's almost like he and Fregin are at war for ownership of Mike Lazaridis' genius and partnership respectively (Ballsillie wants Mike's Genius, Fregin wants his Partnership.) This dynamic extends through the film, as Lazaridis aligns himself more and more with Ballsillie, who in this equation is power. The three push and pull on each other, Ballsillie and Lazaridis trying to claw their way to the top using each other while Fregin is trying to hold onto some semblance of the times "before" Blackberry, a time when he still could communicate with Mike without the noise around them.

There is a feeling, when you watch Blackberry, that you aren't supposed to be there. I'd say it's owed to the fingerprints of Matt Johnson's other works and also cinematographer Jared Raab who worked on both The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. The nature of the vérité style used in these projects, by that I mean using the camera as an observational tool and trying to capture a semblance of "real" instances by focusing more on reacting to a situation than acting in a situation, really accentuated the feeling that you are lingering by an open door, listening to these meetings go down. The film utilizes the abundance of windows to let you watch in an almost voyeuristic way, the destruction of these men as they run around trying to fix things last second. To me the feeling of being watched is integral to sell the latter half of the film, heightening the paranoia felt by the characters. You get to witness these almost intimate moments that fuels the aforementioned tension between Lazaridis, Fregin and Ballsillie as they war against each other.

Now, onto why I like this movie, and there really isn't a clear answer. There is a scene where Mike Lazaridis says "Well, Good Enough is the Enemy of Humanity" and the way the film is in the end about how he gambled away that tenet and lost it all. To beat the iPhone, he breaks the one rule he was adamant about since the beginning; "I do it perfectly or I don't do it." I guess I relate to his perfectionism, its funny because I had never been described as a perfectionist until I became a filmmaker, and even so I'm much too much of a pushover to really get to the level of quality I actually want. Probably why I am a horrible director.

The connection I found was moreso to that of the psychology of the film industry as a whole, even if you focus on quality you "masters" will push you to cut corners of your craft. When you talk to people who see movies as entertainment only, they will tell you Wong Kar Wai is stupid for shooting the action in Chungking Express at a low frame rate. This sentiment is echoed by the businessman, in this case Ballsillie, who is not an engineer, and views the Blackberry as something to sell. Lazaridis views the Blackberry akin to art, something like a magnum opus, a crowning achievement. Their conflict is that of the "filmmaker" and the "master" the master want something quick that they know will hook an audience, an audience full of loud voices that say "I want something simple and cozy!" or "I want something feel good without conflict!" Those demands and then slowly imposed on the filmmaker who then must make the choice of abandoning the prestige, which is what is keeping them under the Master, or fold and be at the whim of profit.

Plainly I read Blackberry as something that can be applied to film, the film industry, and filmmaking. I though it was refreshing amid biopics for it two be two things as once, a biography and semi-autobiographical like Johnson's other works. It's a really great film, so great that I'm considering retrying The Social Network to see if I misjudged it.