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.
 

 

 

CATS (3/10)

by Tony Medley

108 minutes.

PG.

When I saw the Broadway musical CATS, it was at the old Shubert Theater in Century City and I was in the front row. The main thing I remember positive about the experience was that during intermission, one of the cats in the cast was crouched under an alcove just in front of my seat and just looked at me throughout the intermission, as a real cat might do.

I love the old Broadway musicals. But when that charming interlude is what I remember it should be clear that one of the few musicals I didn’t like was CATS, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s least melodic of all his musicals, because of the bland music (except for “Memory,” a great song, deserving to have achieved the status of a standard), so had no anticipation of liking this movie and I wasn’t disillusioned.

For just one thing, for those who enshrine Elaine Paige's and Betty Buckley’s iconic performances of “Memory” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gd_ohoPzYc) in the original London and Broadway productions respectively, Jennifer Hudson’s prelude rendition is a horror. Hudson does a little better with the reprise, but not much. Just watching Paige's performance linked above is more entertaining than this entire film.

Lloyd Webber wrote the music, teaming with Taylor Swift (also in the cast) for the lyrics, of a better than mediocre new song for the film, “Beautiful Ghosts.” In order to fit in with the rest of the lackluster music in this play, it is not what you would call hummable, although the melody is really not that bad. Tellingly, it was left off of the Academy’s short list of 15 songs for nomination as Original Song for the Oscars®.

As an aside, my bridge friend, the late concert pianist Leonard Pennario, held Lloyd Webber in low regard, claiming that his melodies were derivative of earlier works. And, in fact, some have claimed that "Memory" is strikingly similar to the main melody in Ravel's "Bolero." But that doesn't make "Memory" any less, well, memorable.

Directed by Tom Hooper who also has a writing credit on the script by Lee Hall based on T. S. Eliot’s poetry collection "Old Possum's Books of Practical Cats," there is a magnificent ballet halfway through. That’s about the only good thing that I can say about this.

 

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