![]() ![]() It’s when he stops running through the airport, desperate to meet with a man about to leave for vacation, and Jim stops to listen, finally listen, to what he has to say. It’s the intensity with which Jim watches hockey, barely breaking eye contact with the TV when Mike calls, asking him to join the company. His best moments are created through silence. You can already see it being played in banquet halls and auditoriums, while a presenter reads the nominees and their choice clips play to the gathered viewers.īut it’s not what makes Howerton unforgettable. ![]() His closing speech, filled with vengeful bile and an all-time Canadian kicker (“I’m from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!”), is exquisite an apt culmination that demands Howerton go bigger than any of his previous towering temper tantrums, and his incensed escalation does exactly that. Similarly, Howerton’s performance is better when it’s bottled up. Scenes take on a kinetic energy that push events forward with almost as much urgency as Howerton’s unrelenting boss. Johnson (who co-stars as Mike’s best friend Doug Fregin) shoots from the hip, so to speak, employing a loose, jittery handheld style that wouldn’t feel out of place in “Modern Family” or “The Office.” This isn’t a period story that overwhelms you with nostalgic details so much as one that savors whatever minor notes it can catch as the camera flies by. “BlackBerry” isn’t an epic tale, but an intimate one. The movie, like the vast majority of stories, is stronger for being tightly edited. They create clear starting and stopping points for the audience, and the time jumps in between episodes help, too.īut how it plays is almost beside the point. “How’d you do it, Mike?” These similar closing scenes, along with the flashbacks that start Episodes 2 and 3 (one providing added backstory to Jim, the other for Mike), give “BlackBerry: The Limited Series” sound episodic structure. Mike and Jim are again pitching to AT&T, and it (again) ends with them asking a question. An IFC FiĮpisode 2 ends in the same fashion. Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in “BlackBerry” Courtesy of IFC Films. By the time the idea-man has explained his technological breakthrough to AT&T, all the buyers want to know is what they’ll call their phone. As the rushed partnership gets on its wobbly feet, the first episode ends in a pitch meeting that Jim sets up but Mike closes. “Get these fucking nerds to drop everything and build this fucking phone!,” he shouts, before adding a rhetorical “ WHAT!” for emphasis. He screams and curses, rants and raves, rules with an iron fist and brings that fist smashing down onto anything and everything, even the things he’s ostensibly selling. In reality, of course, it’s clear Jim is bad news. He’s an empty suit - no ideas of his own, little understanding of his product - but he makes deals happen, for better or worse. The co-CEOs are, on paper, something of a perfect fit: Mike is a brilliant engineer with poor business skills he can’t rally his team when needed, nor does he know when investors are taking him for a ride. Using the film’s three-act structure as a guide, the first entry sees Howerton’s Jim meeting, dismissing, and then latching himself onto Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), who has a plan to bring email to people’s pockets. To be fair, “BlackBerry” runs somewhat smoothly when split up into three parts. What’s harder is separating them, and they deserve to be seen separately. It’s relatively easy to connect the dots between Dennis Reynolds and Jim Balsillie. Turning a zippy film into a truncated TV show does the opposite, hurting Howerton’s Oscar odds and doing the film a disservice to boot. It needs to be seen as something separate from his past endeavors, not more of the same. If stuffy Academy voters are going to support him throughout the long, taxing FYC season (as they should), his work in “BlackBerry” needs to be distinguished, elevated, and exulted. While exposure is the name of the game for awards campaigns and nascent streaming services, Howerton’s Oscar campaign deserves better. “Why?” is a question with answers both obvious and, I would argue, outrageous. Rather than simply premiering the film as-is and touting its availability on streaming (rather than rental services), AMC has added 16 minutes of footage and recut the two-hour feature into three 45-minute episodes. ![]() This week, “BlackBerry: The Limited Series” aired over three nights, one episode per night, on AMC and is now available to stream via AMC+. “ BlackBerry‘s” distributor, IFC Films, and its parent company AMC Networks made the curious decision to release the two-hour film as a three-part TV show. ![]() ‘Wonka’ First Reactions: Timothée Chalamet Is ‘Magnetic’ in ‘Sweet’ and ‘Whimsical’ Chocolate Saga ![]()
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