NIMROD NATION

Product Description This eight-part original documentary series from filmmaker Brett Morgen (THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) profiles rural Watersmeet, Michigan, where everyone follows the progress of the local high school basketball team - the Nimrods. More a portrait of a small American town than a conventional sports documentary, NIMROD NATION sympathetically observes life and conversation in the local coffee shops, hunting lodges and locker romms as the long, cold basketball season unfolds. Review When I settled in to take a look at Nimrod Nation, an eight-part documentary series that aired beginning in 2007 on the Sundance Channel, I expected to sit still for an episode or two before deciding when and whether to continue. To my not-inconsiderable surprise, I devoured the first four episodes in a single afternoon, took down two more in the evening, and finished out the package the following morning. Taken as a whole, Nimrod Nation is not a great documentary, but its a friendly and unassuming collection of days in the life that gets big points for compulsive watchability. The original Nimrod was a Mesopotamian king described in the Bible as a mighty hunter, and its his status as an outdoorsman that led the people of Watersmeet, a town of about 1500 people in the frigid, snow-centric Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to adopt "Nimrod" as the nickname for its high-school basketball team. As depicted in Nimrod Nation, the people of Watersmeet love to hunt -- or maybe its not simply that they love it as much as its just the way things are done. Even as a kid I was more city slicker than outdoorsman, but my family knew how to hunt jackrabbit and catch catfish, and I recognized the efficiency and pride with which the Zelinski family skins, guts and slices up a given animal. Animal lovers will cringe, but theres a terrific scene at the end of the first episode involving the almost ritualistic execution of a hog thats been fattened for the slaughter -- and the malfunctioning handgun that one of the local kids is using to try and take the big friendly thing down. (I had to look away from the screen before it was over.) Its a great image in part because you can feel the filmmakers triangulating its significance: the unremarkable reality of the situation, the relationship of the documentarians to the event itself, and the (presumed) discomfort of the home viewer. Ostensibly a sports documentary, Nimrod Nation is at its best when its able to extract that kind of vivid, revealing, and/or absurd moment from the lives of these smalltowners. Director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture; Chicago 10) apparently earned the right to get up close and personal with the locals after he made a series of successful promos for ESPN that spotlighted the Nimrods. Morgen returned to Watersmeet the year after the Nimrods won a regional championship to chronicle the teams effort at repeating that success. For most of the shows running time, the basketball games themselves are used as a backdrop, putting tiny slice-of-life stories in perspective. Theres the one about basketball coach George Petersons son, who gets the brunt of his dads color commentary during practice. Theres the one about Brian Aimsback, a talented player whose grandmother feels hes getting slighted because hes Native American. And theres the one about Nathan Vestich, the teams loose cannon in residence, whose anger-management issues will become a problem before the end of the season. The basketball games become a more and more important part of the story leading into the final episodes, which ratchet up the big-game suspense in fairly conventional ways. I liked Nimrod Nation best when it stayed off the court, though -- considering a cheerleaders aspiration of finding a better life in (slightly) warmer climes as a Wisconsin cosmetologist, sitting in on the chatty, self-assured conversations of the old guys hanging out mornings at the local diner, or eave