Sam Klemke's Time Machine
2015
Biography / Documentary
Sam Klemke's Time Machine
2015
Biography / Documentary
6.7
Plot summary
In 1977, Sam Klemke started obsessively documenting his entire life on film. Beginning decades before the modern obsession with selfies and status updates, we see Sam grow from an optimistic teen to a self-important 20-year-old, into an obese, self-loathing thirty-something and onwards into his philosophical fifties. The same year that Sam began his project, NASA launched the Voyager craft into deep space carrying the Golden Record, a portrait of humanity that would try to explain to extra terrestrials who we are. From director Matthew Bate (Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure), Sam Klemke's Time Machine follows two unique self-portraits as they travel in parallel - one hurtling through the infinity of space and the other stuck in the suburbs of Earth - in a freewheeling look at time, memory, mortality and what it means to be human.—Production Company
March 12, 2023 at 03:32 PM
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.WEB 1080p.WEBMovie Reviews
Rather Ponderous & Gross
In 1977, Sam Klemke, living in Denver, Co., decided to film on an annual basis, the highlights of that particular year in his personal life, as well as an update on major world occurrences. Klemke, who became a caricature artist at malls and shows, would continue to film this for the next 37 years, often in a self-deprecating and humorous style, and I can relate to some of his personal struggles.
Perhaps this documentary will appeal to some viewers, but, for the most part, I found it to be quite ponderous, gross, and even cringe inducing, at times. There's a number of gross-out scenes of obese nakedness, as well as graphic bodily functions and bad teeth, which I felt were really unnecessary and served no real purpose, that I could ascertain, other than shock value. The film may be best served as an online vehicle, and indeed in 2010 when Klemke decided to post it on YouTube, running it from present day backwards, it went viral and received over a million hits.
Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate, the writer and director here, chose to interchange the launch of the Voyager space probe, also in 1977, with Klemke's film, and the documentary flip-flops between the two throughout its duration. The Voyager carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc, which is intended to illustrate how we Earthlings live, in case it's intercepted by beings in the solar system. Bate arranged, at the end of the doc, for Klemke's movie to be sent to outer space via the Deep Space Program. Perhaps the aliens will like the film better than I did.
To note: for those concerned about this feature, there were no subtitles on my DVD copy obtained at the library.