Hard Eight (3.5 out of 4 stars)

Why do I even bother ranking movies, when in the end I will always just restate Ebert's ranking? Is it because I happen to agree with Ebert on movies most of the time? I tell myself it's because he and I have the same preferences, but then sometimes I just find him so damn persuasive.

Nevertheless, when I saw Hard Eight on his "overlooked DVD of the week", I thought I'd post it up here again. It was Paul Thomas Anderson's first film, and if you listen to the director's commentary on Boogie Nights, you get the sense it was a nightmare from start to finish. The movie was originally entitled Sydney, named after the Philip Baker Hall character, but the studio made him change the name. They also had much more control over the editing of the film than PTA himself, and I think that that is why he was in the end so discouraged about how the movie came out.

Nevertheless, I have always thought it was a gem. It reads like a short story by Joyce at times. It's story is not a particularly universal story, but it is a focused character sketch of a few people whose lives are hurt and who need one another, and one man who is so ravaged by guilt that he goes to great lengths to redeem himself, but in the end finds he cannot get the blood stains off him. In that sense, I guess, it is a universal story. You see in this first movie many of the themes that he would develop later in his more mature films like Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. For instance, like the brokenness caused by broken families, and the guilt which we cannot erase no matter what we do. The longing for redemption - something or someone to take the guilt away, and the frustrating inability to get the stains out.

It stars Philip Baker Hall as an old gambler who finds down on his luck John C. Reilly and takes him under his wing in order to teach him out to be a gambler in Nevada. Mostly, the lessons focus on small-time things - how to get free meals and free room and board with a little money and some social engineering at the casinos, for instance. It's not quite "con" - it's more about knowing how the system works so you can rise above the wretchedness of going bust in Vegas. It also stars Samuel Jackson and Gwyneth Paltrow, both of whom are phenomenal.