The curse of “Observe & Report,” written and directed by Jody Hill (TV’s “Eastbound and Down”), is that it will probably suffer endless comparisons to Steve Carr’s “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” which came out in January this year.

“Observe,” like “Blart,” features an overweight security guard (played by Seth Rogen) with fantasies about the importance of his profession. “Observe’s” Ronnie invents his own little world as the head of security at the Forest Ridge Mall, everything from smashing skateboards over delinquent youths’ heads to tasing store owners for innocuous misdemeanors.

Unlike “Blart,” however, Ronnie is a hair-trigger away from becoming a Travis Bickle of the Twitter age, a cipher for populist anger against whatever social ill is the “flavor of the month.” (In this case, an anonymous flasher who terrorizes the parking lot of the mall.)

In fact, the iconic character from Martin Scorcese’s “Taxi Driver” seemed to be on Hill’s mind when he was creating “Observe & Report.”

“I don’t have a certain agenda or anything when I’m working.   But I think that maybe, you know, I tried to use the model of character pieces from the ’70s,” Hill said in a conference call with the Pioneer on Tues., April 7.   “Those movies deal with a lot of themes of isolation and loneliness and characters trying to come up with a code and feeling out of place in their time.”

Hill is the latest independent director to break into mainstream Hollywood comedy.   His previous film, the low-budget “The Foot Fist Way,” was picked up by actor Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay (“Step Brothers”) after screening at 2006’s Sundance Film Festival, and it gained a cult following from popular film web sites like AintItCoolNews and CHUD.   Like comedy film luminaries McKay and Judd Apatow, Hill’s films exploit ego-driven males and the social awkwardness they create in relation to other people.

In “Foot,” fourth-degree black belt Fred Simmons runs a “Mcdojo,” where he frequently bullies his pupils.   On Hill’s new HBO series (along with frequent collaborators Ben Best and Danny McBride, who also stars), “Eastbound & Down,” Kenny Powers, a washed-up former major league baseball player, returns to his town but finds that he is not as respected by the people as he once was.   Driven by their overt machismo, Hill’s creations never realize the absurdity of their personalities.

While Hill wanted viewers of “Observe” to laugh at Ronnie and his flaws, he also wanted them to question why Ronnie was the hero.   “You know we praise him, certainly in the movie, but how real is that praise, and what exactly are we praising?” he said.

It’s a point that Rogen agreed with as he calmly deflected comparisons of Ronnie to other “Rogen-ish” characters he’s played in the past: and himself.
“No, not really.   No, I would say pretty much none.   A fascination with guns, perhaps, but I don’t own any guns,” he said.

Hill plays with the audience’s understanding of the Rogen archetype: lazy, sloppy, unattractive, oafish ­: throughout “Observe”.   “Part of me thinks this disgusting pervert is the best thing that happened to me,” Ronnie declares, and it’s an axiom that colors all of his actions throughout the film.     Ronnie is a victim of the loving-but-dysfunctional relationship with his mother (Celia Watson), his bi-polar mind, and: significantly : his sexual dysfunction. His infatuation with Brandi, the beautiful-but-dim cosmetic clerk at the mall, takes a dark-and-disturbing turn when Ronnie consummates his obsession with a visibly-drunk Brandi.

“When we were shooting it, Seth and I were both like, ‘There is no way this is going to be kept in the movie,'” said Anna Faris, who plays Brandi.   “We were both like, ‘This is a Warner Brothers movie.   There’s no way.   This is way too offensive.’   It’s not like we were making some little ‘indie’ here […] But then there it is.     So I gave my parents a glass of wine and I showed them that scene, and I was like, ‘Okay, brace yourselves.   This is a rough one.'”

Faris, who played the lead in 2007’s “The House Bunny,” added that all the characters in the film ­: not just Ronnie: are awful human beings.   Brandi, she said, “was definitely the worst character I’ve played, and I’ve got to [say that] I just loved it.   I loved every second of it.”

The characters in the film may be terrible, but the production behind it wasn’t.

“Everybody was really nice, so everybody was always positive about the material and glad to work and, really, you know everybody was just pushing themselves,” Hill said.

During the production of “Observe,” Rogen said he was acclimated to the atmosphere on set because “it really felt like a little independent film shot by a bunch of friends.”

Rogen met Hill three years ago when he was filming Apatow’s “Knocked Up.”   Hill said he wrote the movie with Seth in his mind as Ronnie, and Rogen instantly signed on when he received the script.

“We kind of just felt like we had stolen a bunch of movie cameras and somehow they [Warner Brothers] let us make this movie in this mall and it was very self-contained,” said Rogen.

And while Hill has graduated to a Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures production, it doesn’t mean that he sacrificed his low-budget approach to the material.
Filmmakers like Hill and similar indie-darling David Gordon Green (who directed Rogen in last summer’s “Pineapple Express” with James Franco), according to Rogen, bring a “really different sensibility” to the atypical Hollywood comedy.

“I just think, you know, for me and Evan [Goldberg, Rogen’s frequent writing collaborator], we’re looking for people who are smarter than us,” he said.   “There’s a reason we don’t direct movies ourselves, ’cause we don’t think we are the best skilled people to do it.”

For Hill, graduating from a small film financed on his credit card to working with Rogen and Faris is an experience he called “surreal.”

“I just feel really lucky that I’m able to make films,” he said.   “You know, I’ve wanted to do it all my life, and I just: I don’t know: I just feel really lucky that I’m able to do that.”