Taglines: If you stay in the game long enough, you’ll see everything, win everything, and lose everything.
Hard Eight movie storyline. Sydney, a gambler in his 60s, finds a young man, John, sitting forlornly outside a diner and offers to give him a cigarette and buy him a cup of coffee. Sydney learns that John is trying to raise enough money for his mother’s burial. He offers to drive John to Las Vegas and teach him how to make some money and survive. Although he is skeptical at first, John agrees to Sydney’s proposal.
Two years later, John, having gotten the money for the funeral, has become Sydney’s protégé. John has a new friend named Jimmy, who does security work, and he is attracted to Clementine, a cocktail waitress in Reno. Sydney encounters Clementine at night, learning that she moonlights as a prostitute. Although Clementine believes that Sydney might want to sleep with her, Sydney actually wants to set her up with John.
Sydney receives a frantic late-night phone call from John, summoning him to a motel. He arrives to find John and Clementine holding a hostage, who is a customer who had refused to pay Clementine $300 for sex. John also reveals that he and Clementine had eloped. The situation is dangerous, because John and Clementine have called the hostage’s wife to demand the money. They do not have a plan, and they have beaten the hostage badly.
Hard Eight is a 1996 American neo-noir crime thriller film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and stars Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, with brief appearances by Robert Ridgely, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Melora Walters. The film, originally titled Sydney, was Anderson’s first feature; Hall, Reilly, Ridgely, Hoffman and Walters regularly appeared in his subsequent films. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. The film was expanded from the principal idea of Anderson’s short film Cigarettes & Coffee (1993).
Hard Eight (1997)
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nathanael Cooper, Melora Walters, Kathleen Campbell
Screenplay by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Production Design by: Nancy Deren
Cinematography by: Robert Elswit
Film Editing by: Barbara Tulliver
Costume Design by: Mark Bridges
Set Decoration by: David A. Koneff
Art Direction by: Michael Krantz
Music by: Jon Brion, Michael Penn
MPAA Rating: R for strong language, some violence and sexuality.
Distributed by: The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Release Date: February 28, 1997
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