Interview. John Sayles.

"From his home base in New Jersey to Louisiana, Texas, Alaska and Florida, novelist-turned-hyphenated filmmaker John Sayles has crisscrossed the country weaving sprawling stories in such films as City of Hope, Passion Fish, Lone Star, Limbo and Sunshine State," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "Unique among his peers, Sayles travels his own road dramatizing an Americana streaked with social realism and a touch of the magical.... Changing times are a dominant theme in Sayles' work and most of his films put forth very specific social issues, but in Honeydripper, these matters are mostly percolating beneath the surface. The film evocatively charts a time and place where change has been a longtime coming and buoyantly imagines a turning point where, at least musically, anything is possible."

Looking back on her September conversation with Sayles, Cathleen Rountree notes "he displayed his impressive encyclopedic knowledge of music, expounded on 'comic book movies' and border politics, and shared a liberal's fears about the final days of the Bush administration."

Updated through 12/31.

"Honeydripper, John Sayles's shambling fusion of pop mythology and social mosaic, imagines the world-changing moment, around 1950, in the rural South when a blues guitarist first plugged in his ax and rocked the joint," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. Sayles "is primarily interested in fusing archetypes from the Jim Crow South, both black and white, with mythic dimensions. An affable blind bluesman, Possum (Keb' Mo'), whose enigmatic smile hints at his possession of secret knowledge, turns up now and again. Everywhere and nowhere at once, his elusive presence helps push the movie toward the realm of fable."

"The movie's less interested in maintaining an accessible narrative arc than in presenting what's essentially a verité depiction of segregated life in rural Alabama, circa 1950," writes Robert Levin at cinemaattraction. "The screenplay contains a wealth of lived-in, authentic dialogue, expressed with natural precision by the gifted ensemble, and the gold hued cinematography perfectly captures the setting's wooden buildings, dusty roads and sun-drenched fields. The particular genius of the filmmaker, then, lies in his evocation of the recognizable emotions latent beneath that unfamiliar surface."

"Honeydripper so slowly builds up to its climax - the excitement only begins as the townsfolk doll up and descend upon the club en masse, the vivid colors of the weekend-best clothing providing a lovely visual jolt - that when Sonny finally plays, the film too feels like it has suddenly, literally, gone electric," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. "Sadly, Honeydripper ends just as it gets going."

"Honeydripper is more hopeful than Sunshine State but possibly more naïve: Music saves the day and racial strife is no more dangerous than Stacy Keach's almost huggable Sherrif Pugh arresting a young musician, Sonny Blake (Gary Clark, Jr), and putting him on cotton-pickin' duty for 'gawkerry with intent to mope,'" writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"When tracking the career of John Sayles, who began writing and shooting low-budget independent movies long before it became fashionable, it's clear he can be as much a muckraker as a filmmaker," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "But Mr Sayles's new film, Honeydripper... doesn't feel like an Op-Ed commentary or a yellowed news clipping sprung to life. It has a more intimate, down-home agenda." But for Nicolas Rapold, this one's "a slog, replete with thudding characterization, bankrupt direction, and childlike plotting. And there's not nearly enough electrified music for one to just wait out the rest of the movie."

"Writer/director John Sayles takes a relaxed approach, letting characters congeal, and [Danny] Glover is the keystone in an ensemble of very human performance," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "But that same leisurely attitude becomes a problem when the plot starts demanding attention again - the twists of the film's final section will feel excruciatingly inevitable to anyone who's seen a movie before, and the payoff isn't there."

"Sayles's films are generally celebrated for their leavened characterizations and authentic grit; Honeydripper, produced with a much larger bankroll than his previous work, lends credence to the notion that independents need to hover around the poverty line to produce anything substantial," writes Leah Churner in Reverse Shot.

For Robert Cashill, Sayles "would make a better playwright than filmmaker. When a friend told me that his latest film as writer and director was 'a John Sayles movie, like every other John Sayles movie,' it wasn't really a dig; it's just that Sayles, at the vanguard of American independent cinema, has been tilling this soil for 30 years now, and hasn't much changed."

"For all his good qualities, Sayles has never been much of a sensualist, and that's the problem at the root of Honeydripper," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It needs to be electrifying, and instead, it's a John Sayles movie."

Choire Sicha talks with Sayles and his partner and producer Maggie Renzi for the Los Angeles Times.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has an online viewing tip: "At the recent Monterey Jazz Festval, two film legends - Clint Eastwood and John Sayles - talked about about the blues in an onstage discussion."

Stephen Saito talks with Sayles for IFC News.

And Patrick Z McGavin talks with Sayles for Stop Smiling.

Update, 12/31: "Like some of Sayles's earlier films - Passion Fish and Sunshine State, in particular - Honeydripper is at its best when the characters sit around, dither, and ruminate," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Moviemaking seems to have become almost magically easy for this independent writer-director. He builds a detailed atmosphere, brings his good people and his bad together, and lets them jabber at one another; the virtuosity is rhetorical rather than visual."

Posted by dwhudson at December 29, 2007 7:52 AM