Welcome to 2026 my project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2001, we are headed to Hong Kong to film some murders in…
Movie: 買兇拍人 [You Shoot, I Shoot]
Year: 2001
Director: Edmond Pang
Country: Hong Kong
The Elevator Pitch: Killer for hire Bart finds himself in pinch but when a client ups the price of his next hit job if he films his kill he ends up teaming up with a amateur film maker – could making movies could be his new passion?
How Was the Movie?:
This was billed as a dark satire but it doesn’t quite fit either of those genres and sits more squarely i the action comedy genre which would have gone over better if I wasn’t expecting at some point the movie would turn into something else. It’s a pretty good movie overall though despite all its talk of Martin Scorsese what it really has is the amateur heart of Quinton Tarantino beating inside of it.
Even though I lived through the 00s as a teen it is really easy to forget how exciting and new the world of digital photography was, especially videography. Before the world turned into a surveillance nightmare and computer graphics and deepfakes got good enough to make plausible copies of things, we all thrived on “seeing is believing” and it’s taken advantage of to the fullest in this movie as a hit man is asked to film his kills only to find that you actually needtalent and experience to do that, leading him to black mail an entry-level film maker into doing his dirty (filming) work.
While the movie is abstractly about killers at the start of the movie it eventually veers into being more about film making. It’s at its best when it’s making fun of Hong Kong cinema tropes but also fall into a lot of pitfalls as well. It’s probably classed as a satire because it so explicitly makes fun of the film industry but it never really does much with that. The movie takes a lot of twists and turns to get where it’s going but they’re all enjoyable though it feels like the movie might have either been re-shot or re-edited at two distinct points because there are basically two distinct halves of the movie which really hinders how much enjoyment I got out of the film.
If you like “opposites attract” style movies, the relationship between Bart and Cheun is a top tier of two comedians really playing off each other but for me I think it was more comedy than heart warming. While I’m not sure I’d recommend this movie to most people, I do hope that Martin Scorsese has watched and appreciated the film at least as much as it appreciates him.
What was for Dinner?:
If you can believe it, I’d never actually made congee for myself. This chicken congee is an amalgamation of different things but I combined a very basic chicken congee with some mushroom sauteed in a flavorful soy mixture and tried to make jammy eggs (I’m never fast enough they’re always 30-60 seconds over somehow). While I actually struggled making this because there’s a lot of “rules” and it was unclear how many of them I could break, it still turned out great and we really enjoyed it. If I made it again I’d definitely make it in a bigger pot because my rice mixture boiled over the edge twice and made a mess but otherwise as you can imagine a rice porridge with chicken, ginger, and very flavorful mushrooms is delicious. It was also extremely filling.
Sorry for the terrible picture but I made it at the end of a long day but I’ll probably make it again so I’ll have more chances in the future to make it picture worthy 🙂
That’s it for 2001, see you in the future year of 2002!