Play like a pro with expert knowledge from a champion of the game

If you don't know the ins and outs of play, bridge can seem like an intimidating game--but it doesn't have to be! Armed with the techniques and strategies in the pages of this book, you'll be bidding and winning hands like a boss! A good book for beginners, it has lots of advanced techniques useful to experienced players, too. This is as  close to an all-in-one bridge book you can get.

 

 

About the Author

H. Anthony Medley holds the rank of Silver life Master, is an American Contract Bridge League Club Director, and has won regional and sectional titles. An attorney, he received his B.S. from UCLA, where he was sports editor of UCLA's Daily Bruin, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He is the author of UCLA Basketball: The Real Story and Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed and The Complete Idiots Guide to Bridge. He was a columnist for the Southern California Bridge News. He is an MPAA-certified film critic and his work has appeared nationally in Good Housekeeping, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. Click the book to order.
 

  

 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (7/10)

by Tony Medley

108 minutes.

PG.

Tom Hanks gives his finest performance in this biopic that adds strong supporting performances by Matthew Rhys and Chris Cooper, among others. It’s hard to believe that a man is this pure but this film, directed by Marielle Heller and written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster, started with a standup by Mr. Rogers’ widow, Joanne, vouching for it. Telling the story of a troubled Esquire Magazine writer, Lloyd Vogel (Rhys), doing an article on him as a vehicle to tell Mr. (Fred) Rogers’ (Hanks) story is uniquely effective to remember the view the world had of a good man. Lloyd is based on writer Tom Junod and the movie is fashioned on the circumstance of his relationship with Mr. Rogers in preparing the article he actually wrote.

In fact, the essence of the movie may be best stated by a quote from Junod himself, when he explained that he went into the interview with a reputation as a hotshot investigative journalist who specialized in takedown features on public figures and was looking for the “dark side” of goodness. He says, “The amazing thing about it, of course, was Fred wasn’t having any of that. Fred saw me, sized me up and went to work, which is where the movie and script is (sic) very, very true to life. Fred had that amazing gift of looking at a person and seeing what that person needed, and that he was going to minister to that person. And that person, in this particular case, was me. And I look back on it now and realize how purposeful Fred was and how relentless he was in doing that.”

There is, however, a B story about Lloyd’s relationship with his troubled father, Jerry (Cooper), that is, as near as I can tell, fiction.

While this vehicle is a unique way to tell Mr. Rogers’ story, and it is effective to capture his TV personality, the movie is far too superficial. We never really get to know who Mr. Rogers is, what he is thinking and feeling, or how he became the man he was. All we come out of the film with is that we have seen a cutout copy of a man who must have had feelings and insecurities and doubts like everyone else, but to its discredit the movie doesn’t touch that. What you saw on TV is what you get here, and that’s not enough.

 

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