Bid for My Life

Bid for My Life is a documentary that follows 22 working days for its star, James Hamer-Morton, in which he does whatever people that won an online auction ask him to do.

Sadly the people that each won a day of his time were rarely engaging themselves, and the editing didn't let us share their story. They seemed to have a broad variety of background, and offered a level of variety the documentary never explored. Their reasons for bidding were covered in a couple of sentences, or not at all; their lives, their situations and their hopes for what might follow the day with James just weren't explored.

Instead the camera focused on James, his feelings about the task, the financial impact of that day's work (which was interesting) and was almost scared of the people he was working with and for.

Credit to James for taking on this task, and the concept was certainly an interesting one. Ultimately the film doesn't deliver on the initial promise, failing to hold attention and never really conveying the emotional impacts for James or his daily managers. I can't really recommend it.

A failing actor trying to get screen time with a form of reality TV. It could have been an interesting concept, just executed in a rather boring way. The whole documentary seemed to be to stroke James' ego. Rather than focus on the people who bid, the whole focus was on James, who lets face it, isn't interesting enough to make a documentary about. I'd never heard of the guy until I'd ran out of things to watch Amazon. Scraping the barrel