Something to watch tonight: Thursday 7 August

Hard Eight (Anderson, 1996)

Some of you may know that I’m lucky enough that two of the remain­ing com­pan­ies who dis­trib­ute phys­ic­al media in Aotearoa send me samples for review every now and then, but because not every read­er here still plays DVD, Blu-ray or UHD, I ration those reviews out a bit.

This has come to bite me, though, because when I was look­ing for shiny sil­ver disc to recom­mend here yes­ter­day, the first three I chose were already out of print. When com­pan­ies say “lim­ited edi­tion”, they really mean it.

But Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut fea­ture film, Hard Eight, is still avail­able, although it’s only the stand­ard edi­tion, not the collector’s ver­sion with the card­board slip cover.

It has taken me a long time to get to Hard Eight, which is a sur­prise con­sid­er­ing I am a fan of — and actu­ally own — sev­er­al of his oth­er pic­tures. It’s a drama set in the seamy under­belly of the gambling life — not even Vegas, it’s mostly loc­ated in the second-tier mecca of Reno.

John C. Reilly plays John, a young down-and-out who is taken under the wing of an exper­i­enced old-timer called Sydney (Philip Baker Hall). The reas­on why isn’t really clear. Sydney doesn’t seem like the sen­ti­ment­al type and he also doesn’t appear to see John as a fin­an­cial investment.

But he shows him the ropes and when we jump for­ward to a year later, we see John mak­ing a pass­able liv­ing as a pro­fes­sion­al gam­bler, although his increas­ing con­fid­ence means he has star­ted tak­ing chances that Sydney doesn’t approve of — includ­ing a friend­ship with casino secur­ity con­sult­ant Samuel L. Jackson and a romantic rela­tion­ship with wait­ress and hook­er Gwyneth Paltrow.

When one of Paltrow’s tricks goes south, Sydney has to step in and fix things but the rails are about to be well and truly run off.

Hard Eight shows off Anderson’s con­fid­ence with both cam­era and act­ors. Hall’s career had been low key up to this point1 but he would go on to work with Anderson again on Magnolia and Boogie Nights. Reilly was also rel­at­ively unknown at this point but is ter­rif­ic as a young man who vacil­lates between being cocky and des­per­ate for approval.

Another reas­on I wanted to watch this was we have just fin­ished a run of rewatch­ing Soderbergh’s Oceans films — there’s a recent box set of all three on 4K UHD — and I was keen to stay in the casino caper milieu but Hard Eight really is the oth­er side of the coin. Or should I say chip?

Where to watch Hard Eight

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Physical media from ViaVision

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Streaming on Prime Video

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Kanopy2 or digit­al rental

UK: Digital rental