![]() Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller, adapting the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, show us where the BlackBerry came from and details its demise at the hands of market forces and business missteps. ![]() These suddenly ubiquitous devices, pressed into the hands of executives and assistants everywhere in the early 2000s, seemed to spring out of thin air, and then suddenly vanished with the advent of the touch-screen iPhone. It meant less liberation from the office and more never not working, creating a Pavlovian response to the clicks, dings and buzzes. Then the reality manifests, and suddenly you have to send emails while you’re on the beach, thereby ruining the whole point of being on a beach. The possibility of email in your fist seemed like a passport to the utopian lifestyle of the digital nomad: Just imagine, you could email from the beach. Clarke declaring that “men will no longer commute-they will communicate,” a promise realized to an extreme during the COVID-19 pandemic (the next corporate biopic should be “Zoom”). But he also opens with a foreboding bit of archival footage of Arthur C. ![]() Johnson leans into the nostalgia, seeding period-appropriate tunes like the Strokes’ “Someday” to aid the acid-flashbacks to the mid-aughts, and utilizing VHS-style camcorder footage in montage. While those lifestyle aspects aren’t necessarily explored in the device biopic “BlackBerry,” written and directed by Matt Johnson, they float to the surface of the subconscious for those who experienced the smartphone revolution in real time. If only Eartha and Orson were here to drag me off to another movie in another cinema, another movie.For a certain generation (mostly Gen X and older millennials), the BlackBerry wasn’t just a phone with email - it was a world- and life-altering shift, a status symbol that quickly became a shackle to the inbox. “Primer” and “Safety Not Guaranteed” and the Spanish “Time Crimes” are proof that you don’t need big money to make sci fi that plays.Ī plot with all the potential for drama left out, deathly dull dialogue, flat performances, ugly locations, the works. Maxx?Īnd no, before you go there, “First Signal” is not so bad it’s “fun.” It just isn’t. Quick show of hands - who wants to see a movie where allegedly Top Security Clearance characters have to explain away why they’re not using Power Point for this presentation? Who wants to see a meeting with a civilian advisor ( Conor Timmis) dressed like a Bond villain who shops at T.J. Think of “Contact” or even the Charlie Sheen “alien threat” thriller “The Arrival.” The best films that capture that first hint that we’re “not alone” make such a scene tense and spine-tingling. “Signal” is a top-down view of how the news that “We’re being watched” is handled, a bunch of actors playing the president, top military and civilian advisors and others, haggling over potential “ridiculous Freedom of Information Act” requests and not letting the public know that aliens have satellites and maybe observers on the planet’s surface.Ĭontrary to the photo above, the vast majority of the 102 minutes of run time is in a drab, generic and underpopulated “conference room” at a G7 meeting that the president ( Wendy Hartman) has been yanked from to be given this momentous news.Īs the film opens with a Carl Sagan quote, it’s worth pointing out how “First Signal” goes completely wrong at the moment of conception. The thumping on the door never stops here, and Eartha and Orson have already taxied off into the Paris night. ![]() Those anecdotes come to mind while trying to labor through “First Signal,” a no-budget sci-fi outing now up on assorted streaming PPV platforms. They’d buy a ticket, duck in, and bail to run off to another theater - all over town, keeping a taxi waiting - until they found something worth sitting all the way through. When the thumping stopped, she poked her head in and saw him reading and making notes from Stephen King’s “The Shining.”Īctress and singer Eartha Kitt told of how she and Orson Welles would settle on a film to watch when they were dating in Paris in the ’50s. And the next day she’d sit in the outside office, listening to the “thump thump thump” against his door as he’d start a book, get a page or three in, and hurl the paperback against that door. He’d send his secretary out to book stores after work every night. The story of how Stanley Kubrick selected his subject for the “horror movie” he wanted to make goes like this.
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