New York Times Movie Review – Observe and Report (2009) [
I haven’t seen Observe and Report yet. But just reading that this guy was inspired by Taxi Driver….oh marone…The New York Times reviewsays, “Mr. Hill says his movie was inspired by “Taxi Driver,” a self-flattering comparison.” Self-flattering is quite right. I don’t see how you can even put the two movies in the same sentence. Having only read about the movie, I only see that the commonalities include the main character being an overzealous and maladjusted not-so-young man with delusions of grandeur and a propensity towards violence.
I’ll be updating this post once I watch it. But seeing this movie is disconcerting to me. The title ‘Observe and Report’ is a phrase taken from the security industry. It describes the main duties of a security officer: to detect, deter, delay, observe, and report. Frankly, I was considering using that as the title of my screenplay. And now Jody Hill screwed that up for me.
Considering that there was yet another movie involving a security professional (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), I’m starting get pissed. My screenplay is a character study. Inspired by movies such as Taxi Driver, One Hour Photo, and The Assassination of Richard Nixon, it’s what I deem to be a portrait of loneliness. It is admittedly largely autobiographic, based on my life experience and of course dramatized. It was also started (as Paul Schrader did for Taxi Driver) as a form of self-therapy. I was thinking that my screenplay would at least have the advantage of being original in that it covered something that I had never seen in a film before: the security professional.
Isuppose that it can’t be too bad…after all, these two films are comedies, and aren’t really that great (at least from reviews/hearsay). I still believe in my screenplay. I just wish that these two movies hadn’t come out to portray in film the previously untouched security industry.
