Watching Richard Sandler's documentary is like discovering a box of old photographs. Here are the sidewalk preachers, pleasure seekers, and urban malcontents that populated Times Square before it was cleaned up, when the theatres showed films with titles like "Horny Frat Girls." Sandler is an accomplished street photographer, and his practiced eye does much with limited means; he builds atmosphere by framing his subjects against the oversized fashion ads and news zippers. He accumulates impressions, theologies, and rants, and presents them virtually without narration; the result is a tone poem of the righteous and the possessed. Some characters are vanishing originals, like James, a bearded cleric who answers every question with one of his own, and Jim, a sallow Englishman who reveals himself to be Jesus Christ and adds that "starting in 1994, he's going to do rock music, marry Madonna," and then "get into international affairs." -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
