We’re back with our friends Aaron & Patrick from Feelin’ Film to talk 2023’s underdog sleeper hit of the year, Blackberry: a riveting, fictionalized biopic detailing the rise & fall of the now-infamous phone. Equally funny and thrilling, Blackberry taps into the spirit of Fincher’s The Social Network or Boyle’s Steve Jobs. It is filled with amazing performances and panache—appropriating Nat Geo-style long-lenses (a stylistic riff stolen from D.A. Pennebaker’s The War Room), leaning into faux-documentary comedic beats (Christopher Guest films, The Office), celebrating the by-the-bootstraps/punk-rock ethos of indie filmmaking (Primer, Slacker, Clerks), and heavily stylizing itself with erratic camera shifts and short, snappy, WanderCam pans (which approximate a sense of eavesdropping on tense, anxiety-inducing affairs). It’s also a topical cautionary message about the dangers of unchecked greed and myopic business decisions, and in this way it resembles the recent slate of streaming mini-series documenting market-driven folly (The Dropout, WeCrashed, Fyre Fraud, etc.).   Although it is only tangentially affiliated with sports (there is a fairly prominent side plot involving an attempt to purchase an NHL team), we felt like this would be a perfect companion piece to our conversation on Air. Both films track the origins of a culture-altering IP, showcasing the competitive ferocity of entrepreneurialism. Both films also examine the ways cutthroat business acumen, team camaraderie, rivaling companies, and creative playfulness clash, dictate, and shape the way technology and commerce operate. Yes, to call this a sports movie would be disingenuously lenient, even for our criminally lax standards. But sometimes it’s good to question genre boundaries, as trespassing outside stringent confines can help delineate and expand one's understanding of the immanent tropes, archetypes, leitmotifs, and structural parameters that can't be compromised.