Word: malling
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Here's a scene to frighten the horses. About an hour into Observe and Report, mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) has finally achieved his dream and taken the blonde, egotistical, doltish perfume saleslady Brandi (Anna Faris) to bed, basically by getting her drunk. Problem is, she's pretty much passed out, her puke staining the pillow, as Ronnie happily, obliviously churns away. He pauses for a moment to notice her comatose state, and without opening her eyes, Brandi mutters, "Why'd you stop, malefactor?" Or a 12-letter word to that effect...
...Observe and Report, and if it doesn't strike you as funny-peculiar, you may as well stop reading now. Most of the rest of the movie is standard-issue comedy rowdiness, with one twist: the hero is borderline bananas. Ronnie, chief security guard at the Forest Ridge Mall, takes his job waaay too seriously. He bullies his staff like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. He thinks his men should be armed with assault rifles, not just Mace and Tasers. He patrols the mall as if it's Baghdad and al-Qaeda is around the corner. He shrugs...
...though he is only peripherally in theirs. Travis had the blonde goddess he dreamed of (played by Cybill Shepherd) and the girl he wanted to protect (Jodie Foster). For Ronnie, Brandi is the woman he aspires to - he says, with feeling, "She's the prettiest girl in this entire mall, if not the world" - though in Faris' acute performance, her dull eyes and sour turn of mouth tell us she should be placed not on a pedestal but in the trash bin. And Nell (Colette Wolfe) is the nicest girl Ronnie doesn't quite notice: a smiling, saintly, abused cripple...
...written some excellent characters and gotten his actors to give them quirky life: Michael Pena as a lisping dude who seems to be Ronnie's firmest supporter on the security detail; John and Matt Yuan as twin mall-cop layabouts; Ray Liotta as a police detective who sneers away Ronnie's ambition to join the force; and especially Celia Weston as Ronnie's mother, who loves her son and her booze with equal, pathetic intensity. Weston and Rogen's scenes together have the sad, sloppy sweetness of two losers who care for each other because they're stuck together. After...
...That's what my life is like. That's my day-to-day. I didn't know anyone as funny as Spicoli, and we didn't grow up in California, and we had burnouts instead of surfers, but I could relate to working at a shitty job at the mall and poor Judge Reinhold having to dress up like a pirate to deliver food, and also Jennifer Jason Leigh getting an abortion, which was really sad. It was honest, and you could tell it came from people who understood a certain community, and it just wanted to capture that twilight...