User Reviews

Don't miss this deeply moving true story of a youth who derailed an illegal auction of Utah's public lands to energy companies. Tim DeChristopher chose the lesser of two evils. He avoided the energy company takeover of public parkland by bidding on the auctioned lands himself - without having the funds on hand to actually buy.

His brave and spontaneous act of civil disobedience landed him in court and then in prison for two years. He served a jail sentence many people thought was grossly unjust. This movie documents a part of the environmental movement in the US that many of us know little about, and is inspiring.

The BRAVEST Americans, it seems to me, aren't the Stormtroopers who volunteer to go do the dirty work of the Corporations who run this company/country, but those who haul off and toss a monkey wrench into The Machinery. Tim Dechristopher talks about "a palpable feeling of helplessness" in the face of this Military Industrial Government- but he STILL had the guts and the brains to try to do something about it. He saw dinosaurs picking over the remains of other, older dinosaurs, and he thought "outside the box" and tripped some of them up (however briefly), although it did cost him in the end: he was convicted for his convictions, jailed unjustly for a Just Cause. "It's about saving lives," he argues in BIDDER 70- but no one man can long stand up against this Corporate Democracy of ours (and here I must refer you one and all to George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR). Dirty Power plus Dirty Money equals Dirty Deal- which is what Dechristopher got. Like Icarus, he flew just a tad too close to the sun.