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.
 

  

 

Zombieland: Double Tap (7/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 99 minutes

R

This is a goofy sequel to the goofy original of 2014 with the same stars and some excellent additions. It’s about a group of survivors, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, and Emma Stone who live in a burned-out USA undergoing a zombie apocalypse. They have to survive by killing the zombies whenever they appear. Because they are difficult to kill again (a zombie is a corpse that has been re-animated), they “double tap” (shoot twice) them to make sure they are, once again, dead. One thing you need to know if you don’t already is that if a human is bitten by a zombie, that human turns into a zombie.

I guess this is in the horror genre, but it is totally played for laughs. The four of them are living in the abandoned White House when Emma Stone gets freaked out by Jesse Eisenberg’s proposal of marriage and splits. Up until this point it has gone along without much involvement. But after Emma runs away Madison (Zooey Deutch) gets into the picture as another human trying to survive. This is when the film picks up from moderately entertaining to much better than average. Whenever Deutch is onscreen, the film soars.

There is a clever plot twist pretty obviously borrowed from a Seinfeld episode when Luke Wilson appears on the screen.

That’s not to say that the rest of it is sublime, however. The acting is outstanding throughout and director Ruben Fleischer (writers David Callaham, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick) keeps the pace up. There are some laugh out loud lines, especially when involving Deutch and Stone.

Don’t leave when you think the end credits are starting to roll because there is an epilogue that will be meaningful only if you saw the first one.

 

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