«BlackBerry», Matt Johnson recounts the rise and fall of the gods of technology – Corriere.it

Capitalism he may have won, but the dead he leaves on the field are countless, even among those who think they are on his side. the moral of BlackBerryMatt Johnson’s Canadian film that opened the competition of the Berlinalerecounting the rise and (ruinous) fall of first smartphone of history, developed by a group of brilliant nerds of Waterloo (Ontario) who came to control 45 percent of the market thanks to a neurotic businessman (Glenn Howerton) who took over.

All played on rhythm and the excitement (and a flood of fuck…), the reconstruction of Johnson (who carves out the role of Doug) leaves aside psychology and social nuances to tell only the business gallop of the company, between boards of directors, low blows and scent of dollarsuntil the SEC (the body that supervises the American Stock Exchange) smelled something burning, ending up destroying what seemed an empirebuilt on the lust for profit and the contempt for rules.

Much more complex and fascinating the Chinese film Bai ta zhi guang known by its international title The Shadowless Tower by Zhang Lu, where the dissatisfaction of the protagonist Gu Wentong, a poet who ended up being a food journalist for a living, mirror of an unhappiness more widespread, which seems to condemn all the people around him. Not a specific fault of society or politics or family problems (Gu is divorced and hasn’t seen his father since he was a child), but rather a kind of widespread poisonwhich has no name but which everyone more or less ends up breathing.

comes to mind theexistential dissatisfaction that gripped the protagonist of the Cry of Antonioni: here the ending is not so tragic, indeed the very dimension of the drama as pushed off-screen by a protagonist who made the kindness he was born in respect for others his own flag, but as his ex-wife tells him sometimes too much kindness ends up build walls. And Zhang shows us those walls in a Beijing unprecedented and painfulwhere people do not know how to defend themselves against unfair accusations and even time seems to stop to make room for just one inescapable solitude.