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Dan Mirvish may be best known as one of the co-founders of Slamdance,
the alternative film festival in Park City that supports first-time independent directors in the way that Sundance did years
ago. He's a filmmaker in his own right, though. While his classmates at USC were churning out unmemorable shorts with
decades-old Bolexes, Mirvish set out to write, direct, and produce a feature film on 35mm. As you could probably guess from
the title in big, bold letters preceding this paragraph, that film was Omaha: The Movie.
Simon has been driven so nuts by his bland, TV-obsessed family and mankind's overreliance on technology that he decides to
leave his lifelong home of Omaha behind. He doesn't find his spiritual center in Nepal as he'd hoped, dismayed that the
Buddhist monks chose to waste away their days watching monster trucks on satellite television. After giving him a gift of
sacred prayer stones, the monks send Simon on his way, and he continues his quest on several continents for the spiritual
enlightenment he so desperately craves. His search proves to be fruitless, and when his savings run dry, a defeated Simon
returns home to Nebraska. It's not long before he runs into Gina, a crazed former girlfriend with a penchant for taking as
many courses at the University of Nebraska Omaha as time will allow. Gina's stint in Gemology was enough for her to be able
to identify Simon's beloved prayer stones as emeralds, which should net enough money for him to continue his search across the
few areas of the world he's left untouched. Strapped for cash and almost immediately sacked from his telemarketing gig, Simon
relents and heads with Gina to the mall for an appraisal. A jeweler refers him to wholesalers in Denver, though he has his
own agenda. Colombian jewel thieves are hot on their trail, resulting in a battle to the finish in Carhenge.
For nearly the entire length of the film, I had an unremovable smirk on my face. I haven't felt the need to gush so much
about this sort of independent comedy since I caught Joe's Rotten World at a Charleston film festival back when I was
in high school. (As a wild, exciting coincidence, Joe's Rotten World joined Omaha: The Movie as one of
the films screened at the inaugural Slamdance in 1995.) Its offbeat sense of humor is very much in line with my own.
Take this description of one fairly early scene: as Colombian jewel thieves watch on, Gina spins around in a barber's chair
and uses Tae Kwan Do to fend off a roving gang of Iowan kickboxers. That sentence alone should give some indication of what
kind of film Omaha is. Despite featuring a station wagon car chase and handwritten subtitles/intertitles, the humor is
kept just short of surreal, not seeming as if it's wacky merely for the sake of wackiness. Omaha is an attractively
shot film, and thanks in part to the talent behind the camera and the use of 35mm short ends, it certainly doesn't look like a
$38,000 production. A slew of actors and inexperienced locals (including mayor P.J. Morgan and governor Richard Roth)
contribute their talents, and Jill Anderson's manic performance as Gina is perhaps the film's greatest asset.
Omaha: The Movie is a unique and often very funny film that almost defies classification, and it's a shame that the DVD
release isn't as widely available as it should be.
Video: Omaha: The Movie sports a full-frame presentation, and though director Dan Mirvish has stated his
preference for a letterboxed version, the lack of mattes has a negligible impact on the experience. The presentation, with
one fairly significant quibble, is decent enough. The image is clean and fairly sharp, and both colors and black levels
appear to be accurately reproduced. I spotted some minor vertical jitter twice, and some shimmering and moire patterns were
also visible on occasion. The oddest flaw, which is present for the entire length of the movie, is a little more difficult to
describe as I haven't run across it in any of the other 500+ DVDs I've watched. Omaha looks as if some sort of fine
mesh has been spread about in front of the screen, as if I were peering through a screen door window. This is enormously
distracting in the film's early moments, though I was able to mentally filter it out after a short while. Perhaps Mirvish
will have the opportunity to revisit Omaha on DVD in the not-too-distant future, but in the meantime, the presentation
on this disc will suffice.
Audio: The end credits state that Omaha was recorded in "Ultra Stereo", though my receiver seemed hellbent on
piping the audio entirely through my center channel, leaving my fronts and surrounds idle for the duration. Interestingly,
the surrounds were active for portions of the commentary, so...whatever. The monaural audio is reasonably robust, carrying
enough of a low-end kick to leak through to my subwoofer intermittently. Dialogue is clean and discernable, and hiss and
distortion are nowhere to be found.
Supplements: Spurred on by questions tossed out by a Slamdance projectionist and a 'festival whore', director Dan
Mirvish provides an excellent commentary track for Omaha: The Movie. Everything I look for in a commentary is present,
offering an excellent balance of great production anecdotes and various technical notes, and the presence of the couple of
guys whose name I don't remember offhand keeps pauses in the discussion to a bare minimum. I'll refrain from spoiling
everything, but some of my favorite stories included why the Red Robin mascot was picking up an American Airlines parcel, a
then-unknown 311 offering to score the movie, and the Sundance-rejected film that helped to create the 'parasitic' Slamdance
being one of the first movies picked up by the fledgling Sundance Channel. Mirvish also discusses in detail the headaches of
self-distribution, which I found particularly interesting. To get an idea of what to expect from the commentary, feel free to
take a gander at the war story on Mirvish's site. It might
be worth a mention that the commentary wasn't recorded in a ritzy, overpriced recording studio, but in a condo in Park City
with a $30 mic from Radio Shack.
There is some brief behind the scenes footage of the climatic Colombian jewel thief battle at Carhenge, and the intro by Dan
Mirvish can be viewed directly as well. Rounding out the supplements is a gallery of twenty or so photos, each including cute
little textual comments. Just to show how much of an idiot I am, I thought this was the kind of gallery where I was supposed
to use the 'right' button on the remote to cycle through them, entirely disregarding the fact that a song was playing in the
background. I kept hitting the button repeatedly, irritated that my DVD player was being so unresponsive. Like, ten photos
in, I finally caught on that the pictures were advancing themselves and that I could give my thumb a rest.
The InsideDVD material on the flipside includes oodles of trailers and teasers (A Beautiful Mind, High Crimes,
Ice Age, Scooby-Doo, Showtime, All About The Benjamins, Eight-Legged Freaks, Count of
Monte Cristo, Minority Report, Rat Race, and Laird), interviews (Russell Crow for A Beautiful
Mind, Spy Game's Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, and someone or something related to Dark Days), two short
films (bigLove and The Kiss), music videos (a live rendition of Madonna's "Holiday", Barenaked Ladies' "Thanks
That Was Fun", Green Day's "Macy's Day Parade", New Order's "60 Miles An Hour", Disturbed's "Down With The Sickness", Smashing
Pumpkins' "untitled", and Guided by Voice's "Glad Girls"), and previews of features for the DVD releases of Rush Hour
2, Zoolander, Jurassic Park 3, Bones, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I believe that is
officially the longest sentence ever.
Conclusion: For the time being, Omaha: The Movie is not the sort of DVD you can swing by Best Buy and grab or
order from your online retailer of choice. Though 350,000 copies of disc were distributed to subscribers to "Total Movie and
Entertainment" and packaged with a number of Pioneer set-top DVD players, the only place to order it directly is through Dan
Mirvish himself. Ordering information is available on his website at http://www.slamdance.com/mirvish/. Omaha won't appeal to all tastes, but for the sorts of people
who need at least two hands to count their They Might Be Giants CDs and have Army of Darkness action figures
prominently displayed on their mantles, this DVD comes Recommended. |
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Buy: