Blackberry (Amazon)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today. In the show, we were talking about the movie BlackBerry, which is a bill right now for rent on Amazon. So there's a bit that Bill Bird does and he talks about Steve Jobs. He did this on Conan and he said that he doesn't think Steve Jobs is that impressive, because Bill's attitude is Steve just liked to do a room with a bunch of like coders or something that he was like, all right, I want music in a little phone thing, you know, get it done. And that was his attitude about Steve Jobs. And I thought about that bit constantly watching this movie BlackBerry, which is sensationally good. I had no idea that the history of the BlackBerry was so compelling, and this came. Actually, you know, it's a little bit of a not to say that it's like a you know, tundra kind of landscape. But you know, Berry just went off the air, Succession

1:32 just went off the air. I was sort of feeling like, man, what am I gonna What am I gonna watch? What am I gonna talk about? And I saw this movie was available for rent on Amazon for seven bucks in HD. Totally worth it. It's excellent. It's sort of obviously like I'm sure, nowhere near the budget, but it's very reminiscent of the Social Network. But it's also like a very Canadian version of the Social Network and also very not Canadian at the same time. And I'll get into this, you know, some specifics that I think we'll illustrate that. But the guy who made this movie is a guy named Matt Johnson. And Matt Johnson did a movie called The Dirties, which you may not have seen. It's a bit more obscure. I saw it back when I was a developing executive, and I thought it was excellent, and I'm sure I tried to offer him something, and you know, to try to get in touch with him, because he's super talented and just like in the Dirties, he acts in this film and he's also a really interesting actor. He's a very natural way about him and he's sort of naturally comic, and his part in the movie is also great as an actor. But the reason I say it's very Canadian, very not Canadian at the same time is that Jay Barrischell plays sort of like the creator of the BlackBerry with Matt Johnson's character. It's kind of like they come up with it together, and they are very Canadian, very polite, they're kind to each other. And then Glenn Howarton from a Toy Sunny Philadelphia plays this guy who comes in and kind of supercharges the company, and he's the sales guy and the business guy. And I think in real life

3:05 he's Canadian, but he's the character is not Canadian in meaning that he's very rude. He's very American. Actually, he's very capitalistic, rude, cutthroat. Not to besmirge my fellow Americans, but I think it's fair to say that we're a bit more capitalistic and intense than Canadians, who you know, I lived in Canada for a year. Canadians are like the nicest people on the planet. I want to explain why this movie is so good and there's a sequence that happens. It's like forty five minutes in. I don't think this will spoil your enjoyment of the film, and I think if you know what happens in this sequence, you'll understand why you should watch it and why it's worth renting and why honestly, it's one of the better movies that I've seen this year. So we're forty five minutes of the movie. We've established that Glenn Howardton and Jay Barrischell need each other. And I really related to this because I've had professional experiences where I've felt like, you know, I'm sort of the creative guy, and I could speak to creative, i could speak the language of other creatives, but I need a business guy with me, right because I'm not the business guy. And I found anytime I've had significant success, it's because I've had that person and we sort of balance each other out. So, you know, the business guy, maybe by himself, would not necessarily have, you know, all the creative the way of speaking to creatives that somebody who is just a pure creative would have. And if you are somebody who's a creative, you're not going to have the business savvy that the business guy would have, and so that makes a great partnership.

4:35 And that's what you see with Glenn Howards and Jay Bershell. And there's a moment, so forty five minutes in they're going to this pitch meeting in New York and Jay loses the prototype of the BlackBerry in a cab and seemingly abandons the pitch like seemingly just like leaves, and Glenn's in the pitch by himself. He's pitching the Saul Rubeneck and he makes a great pitch, but it doesn't matter because he's not a tech guy. He doesn't actually understand the tech knowledge of it. And so Sal Rubane's like, what you're talking about is not possible. We've tried it. And so Glenn is stymy. No matter how well he pitches it, there's no way for him to sell it without someone who can speak to the creative technology side of it. And then Jay comes in late. He's found the prototype and he is a tech guy, and he immediately explains how he figured something out that nobody else could figure out. There were multiple other companies trying to do this, and you see Sal Rubeneck, you know, sort of like light up and then he uses the prototype and Jay's like, you know, if you use your thumbs, it's kind of easier, and you see him using his thumbs, and it's it's like, oh, this is the birth of something that now we all do constantly, right, And it feels just electric, right. It's that sequence is as good as anything in the Social Network. Really it is.

5:53 And even though it's not as polished, I don't think I'm sure again, like I said, I'm sure they had one budget of Social Network, but the quality of the craft of the storytelling, the acting, the sort of energy of it, it's great. It's really really good. And I think for Matt this was kind of inevitable. You could see his talent in his first film, and I think this is his third film, and I'm just really excited because it's you know, his previous two films. I didn't see the second one, but I mean I saw the first one, and they felt even though I'm sure they were carefully they almost had to be carefully designed, but they didn't feel as constructed from a scripting perspective. And again, you compared to The Social Network with Sorkin, you know, that's not a small bar to clear in terms of the comparison the quality of the writing, and I think this is competitive to that comparison, which is a significant thing to say. So yeah, I was really impressed. And it has such energy and it's so fun. And then it has a big time jump, so you know we're going to it's the promise of the premise, right, we sort of know that we're going to follow the rise and fallow BlackBerry, So we jumped forward into time. And now the company faces different challenges, right, And there's a moment where they invent like texting already exists, but they invent texting where I guess texting used to cost ten cents per text and they invent texting through data that doesn't cost anything. And it's like they won the Super Bowl, if they started celebrating, they're putting up music and they're

7:27 dadzig, is this a great road? It's so fun to take this ride with these guys. And there's also I thought a lot of stuff that really rang true if you've studied other successful businesses that sort of came and dominated the landscape, and you know, like, for example, there's a great documentary where they talked to Jimmy Iovine and Doctor Dre about making the Beats by Dre headphones and how did those headphones become so big? Basically, Doctor Dre and Jimmy Ovine, anytime they hung out with somebody who's a famous person, they would just give them the headphones and try to get them take a picture or talk about it or something. And that's what Glenn Howardton has his salespeople do. He finds out he goes to Google and he finds out they're calling the BlackBerry the Crackberry, and he tells the salesman go hang out anywhere which people are and just use the BlackBerry. And that is part of what helps fuel its popularity, is it becomes almost like a status symbol. I love movies like this where it's about something that none of us actually understand, but you get so invested in it, in the technology, and like, oh, are they going to figure out the data load and crap like that. At a certain point, they're at a diner and I think they're moving salt shakers around and demonstrate stuff. Anything like that. I'm always into that. And I also loved how this film doesn't present Jay and Glenn as complete opposites, meaning that the obvious thing to do with the Glen is the bad guy.

8:52 Jay is this sort of sweet, you know, innocent guy, and that's the dynamic between them. But you clearly see over the course of the movie, and eventually they bring in Michael Ironside as like an additional kind of heavy hitter, which, by the way, great to see him. He's good in this. Its haven't seen him in a while. You clearly see the Jay starts using Glenn Howarton and Michael Ironside to do the things that he knows must be done for the good of the business. But he doesn't want to do it himself. He's too soft to do it. So he'll suggest, hey, maybe we should do this, which is the cutthroat move, but he just has them sort of do it for him. So again it's like the characters are complex, they're nuanced. It's not a simple sort of you know, one is good, one is bad. And at the same time, the movie does pose the question what is success worth? What does it cost? Jay over the course of the movie becomes clearly more like Glenn in terms of different characters, and it's like, you know, if you're successful, but in order to be successful, you have to kill the morale of your company and the people who work for you. Is that worth it?

9:58 If you push the envelope in terms of what is necessarily legal in order for a short term success, is that going to eventually come back and haunt you? So it sort of deals with those questions. I thought, very elegantly. It's again it's well, it's really well written. The beginning and end of the movie. There's a sort of callback they do that I won't spoil, but it's just as good as what they do in the Social Work. Like, I'm so impressed with it. It's so satisfying. You take the ride with these guys as they face these existential thrusts of the company, and anytime they overcome them, you're like cheering, You're like yeah, And so it's just yeah, I was this is a really pleasant surprise. I mean, I knew how good that Johnson was. I honestly expected this movie to be good, and then I was encouraged to hear a lot of buzz about it going into it, and I think it was even better than what I was expecting. So I don't want to kind of puff it up too much, you know, I like, but I thought it was excellent and I think that if you rent it, you won't regret renting it. And it really good use of Len who's stellar in the movie. He's like a coiled he is like it is the acting performance equivalent of like a king Cobra that's coiled and ready to strike for two hours. That's what Glenn Howarton is doing this movie. I thought Jay was really good. Mad He's really good.

11:16 It's like the third lead. There's a great payoff with his character that is apparently true to life. That it was incredibly you know, cathartic. So yeah, great movie, BlackBerry. If you have seen it, I'd love to know what you think. Encourage you to check it out. It is available for rent on Amazon right now. That is the show for today. As always, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That is the best way you can support the program, and you can always hit me up at Bennimore Dan on Twitter, Watch This Night on Instagram, watch This Tonight TikTok, watch This Night podcast on TikTok, or you can join our Facebook group. Until next time, Bye bye, love and be loved,