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.
 

  

 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (3/10)

by Tony Medley

141 minutes.

PG-13.

So it’s come to this. Director (and writer with Chris Terrio and five other credits mostly “story by;” it’s hard to believe it took so many people to think up this “story”) J.J. Abrams has made a film, the third in a trilogy that has mercifully come to its end, that feels as if it belongs in the Buck Rogers genre. In fact, the villains are so leaden it sometimes seems as if we have been transported back to the 1930s and are actually watching one of Buck’s adventures. Could this entire film be camp?

In one scene a lead character is asked, “Which way?” He responds, “I have no idea; follow me.” That pretty much sums up this movie. It is so disjointed it makes one wonder if it weren’t originally much longer and lots got left on the cutting room floor, including reasonable segues.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) is now the leader of the good guys and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is her nemesis, out to kill her. But the story, such as it is, is like most of the original Star Wars progeny, it’s there for the special effects; the story is just a pretext.

And it is loaded with the usual special effects to buttress the absurd story line of approximately five people taking on what seems like untold millions. Even a long time ago in a galaxy billions of light years away, the laws of reason would apply and these stories would be too ludicrous to be involving.

The first Star Wars film is still the best, and the only one, really, worth seeing again. The rest of them (which always seem to tell the same story), including this one, are for Trekkies only.

Unfortunately, even though we can now wave goodbye to all these characters that Trekkies have come to know, Disney has a bunch of new ones set up to roll out like waves over the next few years. Let’s just hope they have a new theme, too, that might make these more interesting instead of the same old, same old.

 

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