THAT MOMENT : Sydney's Work Walk

Hard Eight (1996)

My parents kept a handful of Movie Reference and Film History books in their library when I was growing up, but the most useful (and utilitarian) one was The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter. Useful for when we needed to know a date of release or an actor or director's filmography, and utilitarian because that's all it was good for, as we largely dismissed the "reviews" that accompanied each film listing because they often clashed with our own tastes. (We tried Leonard Maltin's guide and it resulted in his literature and likeness being banned from our home forever!) Anyway, the point of this is that, while the end credits of Boogie Nights were still scrolling up my TV screen for the first time, I was scanning the index of the Movie Guide, trying to see if this guy had made anything else.

That singular lone credit in microscopic font - Hard Eight. I'd actually known it -- or I'd known of it, I remembered the poster(!) from the video store I briefly worked at with my mom, and it stayed in my mind because I remember thinking, "Wow, if the guy from Midnight Run and the guy from River Wild are the main stars then this must be a really cheap movie." But I certainly wasn't scoffing when I learned of the talent behind it. Obviously I knew which video store to find it in, and added to that, the movie actually aired on Showtime shortly thereafter, so that led to me having my own taped copy (in the very short period before I bought a real copy). But this isn't really about how I discovered it or the first time I saw it or even the 100th time I saw it, but actually more about my most recent viewing. 

There's a lotta debate and rankings and listicles floating around now that he has a new movie out, but for a megafan like me I don't really need to break my back for any big "reevaluation" - I've held my finger on this pulse from the very beginning and I'm able to assess and digest every new work with much joy and little effort. For me, any minute of Hard Eight is more exciting than the entirety of One Battle After Another, and most of that is rooted in the evidence that this is a first time filmmaker with something to prove, and a unique style and a shitload of talent to prove it. And that style comes into focus at about 30 minutes into the movie, as P. T. demonstrates his now signature move of leading/following behind his character as they walk from A to B. He didn't invent this simple camera move, but he somehow managed to make it his own; the height of the camera, the distance from the subject, the speed, the smoothness, the lens -- hell you've seen it, I barely have to describe it. But it's here, in this fist feature, that his intentions are made clear; for a freshman effort in the mid 1990s the Crime Thriller was an obvious (almost mandatory) choice, though this isn't a ballet of bullets intolerably edited to a buncha Classic Rock songs, but instead a showcase for a director's favorite actor, and a portrait of a character illustrated in fine detail -- not through pages of expository dialogue, but with natural actions and reactions. Like walking. 

- Paul