The Movie: Hard Eight (aka Sydney) was the first "real" movie made by P.T. Anderson, more known for Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and it was recommended to me by a certain young gambling aficionado that I know... I popped it into my Netflix queue, and moved it up on my list once I looked at a description of it and realized that most of it took place in and around Reno.

Hard Eight is a film noir-ish movie about a wise, cool "old timer" named Sydney (played by Phillip Baker Hall) that has had more than his share of experience running various rackets throughout his lifetime. He seems to have a bleeding heart for helping the down and out, and generously takes under his wing a down and out guy named John (played by John C. Reilly), who had just lost all his money in Vegas in an attempt to win $6,000 so he could pay to bury his dead mother.

Sydney brings John to Reno, loans him a few bucks, and shows John how to scam the casinos into giving him a free hotel room and some meals and show tickets, helping John get back on his feet. In the meantime, Sydney also takes a down-and-out waitress (Gwyneth Paltrow) under his wing and helps her out too. Through out all of the worst possible situations they could have gotten themselves into, the cool and collected Sydney remains a level headed resource.

Oh yeah, somewhere along the way, Samuel L. Jackson shows up with the craziest hair and the pimpin'est outfit you've ever seen, spouting off some very Pulp Fictionesque lines... it was definitely worth seeing that aspect of this film!

This whole movie has you wondering what the hell is really going on here, and you're really not sure why Sydney would go through all this trouble to help these people. This aspect of this film I'm sure would trouble a lot of people, but I just found this to be a very cool film, with a distinctive look, and a lot of style. Of course, for some people a look and some style isn't enough to keep their interest, so although I rate this movie a "3", I'm not saying you will too.

You can definitely see some similarities with this film and P.T. Anderson's later films, and appreciate the refinement that has gone on in his film making process. The musical score is like a proto-Magnolia score, with some very similar chord progressions and themes going on, and I can only assume that Aimee Mann had quite a bit of influence in this department.

The DVD: This is a dual-sided disc, with a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen version on one side, and a pan-and-scan version on the other. This movie was shot using the Super 35 process, so I'm sure some consideration was probably given to the 4:3 composition during the making of this film. The transfer is pretty clean overall, but there are a few hitches with the compression that manifests itself as stepped gradients, especially in the scenes where the backgrounds are painted a solid color with uneven lighting on them.

The 2.0 surround audio mix is adequate, but pretty unexciting. But as far as extras go, this disc is pretty well packed with stuff, including two separate audio commentary tracks, some deleted footage, two trailers, and a few scenes from the Sundance Institute Filmmaker Lab that were from a previous version of this film called "Cigarettes and Coffee" shot on video, that were basically exactly remade (with a much larger budget and shot on film, of course) in Hard Eight. There's a lot here that really sheds some light on what went into the making of this movie.

So yeah, if you're a fan of this movie, I'm sure you will appreciate this disc, especially for the insightful extras that it comes with.