Things I Do for Money (2019)
(On Cable TV, April 2021) A strange combination of Canadian Content requirements and pandemic-induced blockbuster drought means that as 2021 unfolds, premium Canadian movie channels are essentially grabbing any interesting Canadian movie produced in the past five years, then putting them centre stage as their big premieres of the week. As a result, we’re exposed to significantly lower-budgeted films on a weekly basis. Some of them are unremarkable to the point of being hardly worth discussing, and then there’s the odd surprise. Things I do for Money is rough, scattered, and quirky… but when it clicks, it’s almost unique in its aesthetics. Proudly and loudly set in Hamilton (ON), it’s a film that revolves around two young cello-playing brothers of Japanese ethnicity as they deal with organized crime gangs. As far as crime genre elements go, there’s a bag of money, an expensive painting, complicated family dynamics, and rival gangs of different ethnicities — all things we’ve seen before. But it’s in the things never (or rarely) seen before that the film distinguishes itself — by making cellos an integral part of its soundtrack, for instance, the film gets two or three suspense sequences with a great foreboding soundtrack (at least one of them played in diegetic sound). The relationship between our two protagonists (played by real-life brothers Theodor and Maximilian Aoki, and eventually with their real-life father) is not commonly seen, the grandmotherly foul-mouthed Jamaican antagonist played by Colette Zacca is wonderful (oh, that bingo scene!), the use of drone cinematography is interesting for what feels like a micro-budget film and the promotional material highlights that this is the first Japanese-Canadian film, with ethnically and musically appropriate leads. The flip side of having so many fun things in the same film is that the entire production doesn’t cohere as much as it should. By the time writer-director Warren P. Sonoda makes his film become family drama, crime thriller, dark comedy, teenage romance, social commentary and then a thievery caper, it’s normal to feel as if all of those components should have co-existed more harmoniously together. The caper, in particular, seems a bit too much. Still, Things I Do for Money can be surprising in its details and exhilarating when the music starts: it’s not perfect, but I’d rather see something rough like this than an inert by-the-numbers production that you can’t remember as soon as the credits roll.