Mall cop meets Taxi Driver? No way.

New York Times Movie Review — Observe and Report (2009) [PDF]

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 review says, “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.

I suppose 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.