The Gods of Times Square (2000) documents the transition of New York City's Times Square from a funky collection of independent sex shops and adult theaters, small diners, huge fashion billboards, eccentric street preachers and performers, vagrants and other colorful characters, to a soulless corporate theme park of flagship stores, chain restaurants, and mainstream advertising, catering primarily to tourists.

The Gods of Times Square is assembled from 100 hours of video taken by first-time filmmaker Richard Sandler between 1992 and 1994, along with some supplementary material shot in 1999. Sandler's professional background as a photographer is most apparent in compositions of the fashion billboards that once dominated the landscape of Times Square. Much of the first hour of The Gods of Times Square revolves around juxtapositions of these billboards with the street preachers and other odd characters below.

Sandler is at his best as a documentarian when he passively records people as they go about their business. The passionate conviction of many of his spiritually-motivated subjects that they are privy to the means of eternal salvation and their desire to save others is poignant.

Unfortunately, Sandler quickly asserts himself as the documentary's central character: the assertive interviewer. Sandler is like the tourist who gets off a cruise ship for a one-hour stop in some exotic locale bent on wringing every drop of local flavor from the town in the allotted time. He assaults unsuspecting people with a camera in the face, and a barrage of questions in the ear, intent on determining whether they're quirky enough for his purposes, but ready to turn away the moment the interview drags or a more interesting subject appears.

Sandler often pushes his subjects along with pointed questions aimed at eliciting explosive, rather than thoughtful, responses. He's also apt at slicing and reassembling sound bites from a half dozen interviews into an undifferentiated whole that sacrifices the coherency of the individual statements for a cheap laugh at the similarities in such seemingly disparate messages.

The best thing in The Gods of Times Square is Jimmy, a somewhat hip young Englishman who thinks he may be Jesus. Jimmy has his doubts, but he thinks he hears the voice of the Holy Spirit in his head telling him that God's plan for humanity's salvation involves him becoming a famous entertainer and marrying Madonna (the pop singer, not Jesus of Nazareth's mother). Though Jimmy's story is definitely interesting in itself, what makes him so memorably is how sweet and guileless he seems. Repeatedly, Jimmy says the camera makes him uncomfortable and he'd prefer to just talk to Sandler without it, but when Sandler dismisses Jimmy's reservations, he continues to speak from the heart about his turmoil as though Sandler is his closest confidant.

Times Square underwent a substantial transformation between when the original footage was shot in 1992-1994 and the supplementary footage was shot in 1999. Sex shops and adult theaters were forced out by regulation and other small mom-and-pop businesses left because of escalating property values and taxes. In their place came Disney and other corporate flagship stores and restaurants. Sandler clearly sees this as a significant loss of authenticity and a diminishment in the opportunities for free speech. He pursues this as a second focus of the documentary, but in doing so he undermines his earlier work by mixing in the anti-consumerist political street theater of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping with the authentic street preacher shots recorded a decade earlier without warning or explanation. If Reverend Billy is more artful performer than proselytizer, what else is not to be trusted?

The DVD

The Gods of Times Square is available in a 2-disc set by Brink DVD. Unfortunately, the DVD packaging is poor. The second disc is held inside the case by a pair of fragile plastic hinges, one of which was broken on the copy I reviewed. Further, the cover art misspells the name of blurb writer Sam McAbee, and attributes him to a closed internet site.

The Video:
The Gods of Times Square was shot on standard definition video, and is shown in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The video quality is fair given its source material.

The Audio:
Sandler appears to have relied mostly on the video camera's built in microphone for sound. This mostly works, though optional subtitles would have been a welcomed addition. The DVD preserves the original 1.0 mono audio track.

There is no consistency in the audio levels between the feature presentation, the extras, and the Brink DVD disc startup logo and menu. Beware: the disc startup is extremely loud and will have you fumbling for the remote.

The Extras:
Surprising this release contains a second disc comprising 87 minutes of video not used in the feature documentary. The longer segments, especially the extended interview with Jimmy, are as good as anything included in the feature presentation.

Final Thoughts:
Richard Sandler's The Gods of Times Square (2000) documents the transformation of New York City's Times Square from a flavorful bastion of non-conformity in the early nineties, to a theme park of corporate capitalism less than a decade later. Though the street preachers and eccentrics that populate The Gods of Times Square are themselves interesting, Sandler's strident interviewing style and heavy-handed editing fatally mar the documentary's potential impact. Skip it.