Thoughts on Hard Eight

In April 2021, I watched Hard Eight on Criterion, and really dug it a lot. It’s the 1996 directorial debut of Paul Thomas Anderson, a noir film starring a tightly packed cast of Philip Baker Hall as a seasoned con man/gambler, John C. Reilly as the hapless loser he picks up to pull off a low-level con job in a Vegas casino, Gwyneth Paltrow as a sex worker/cocktail waitress who tails around with them and gets caught up in some complicated situations, and Samuel L. Jackson as a security guard with a slick attitude who knows Hall’s actual background and hidden connection to Reilly. I loved how this movie felt so compact with such a small main cast, and it was suspenseful with a lot of fantastic character drama and underground shadiness. Plus, an up and coming Philip Seymour Hoffman has a standout scene as an obnoxious douche with mullet-y hair quietly irritating Hall at the craps table, and who undergoes his own sad transformation within a couple of minutes.

And this was likely filmed around the time that Jackson was in The Long Kiss Goodnight, because he closely resembles his character from there in this film.