The Burnt Orange Heresy

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.

The Burnt Orange Heresy (5/10)

by Tony Medley

99 minutes.

This starts right out hitting a home run as art historian James Figueras (Claes Bang) is teaching his art class about a piece of modern art that just looks like someone threw a bunch of colors on a canvas. He explains the intricacies and why the painting is meaningful, then asks his class who would like a print of the painting and all their hands go up.

Then he tells them that the painting is just something he threw together, that it was nothing meaningful and was just what it appeared to be, a bunch of paint splashed on a canvas, revealing a lot of what is considered “modern art” is really nonsense.

After class one of the students, Berenice Hollins (Elizabeth Debicki) comes up to him and they begin a relationship.

James is invited to the mansion of a billionaire, Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger) whose guest living in a small house on his property is a world-famous painter, Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland) who has become a recluse a la J.D. Salinger after all his paintings were burned up in a fire. James wants to interview him and Joseph wants James to steal one of Jerome’s paintings, which Joseph thinks he has been painting since he moved into the house.

That’s the gist of the film as James worms his way into Jerome’s confidence.

The movie slowly falls apart as it struggles forward to its unsatisfying conclusion.

All that said, I did enjoy the performances of the main actors. Jagger surprised me when he appeared in The Man From Elysian Fields (2001) and gave a terrific performance in a dramatic role because he’s nothing like the wild rocker everyone knows from The Rolling Stones. Sutherland, too, is always enjoyable. Debicki makes a lot more out of her role than is really there, and that’s to her credit.

Unfortunately, the problem arises because director Giuseppe Cappodonti and writer Scott B. Smith (from a novel by Charles Willeford) have not created the requisite tension that needs to be there for a film like this to succeed. Whether that’s the fault of lead actor Bang or the script or the directing is hard to pinpoint, but Bang seems to get as much as he can out of what he is given to work with. Without that tension the movie just doesn’t make it, and that’s a shame because in the right hands it could be tantalizingly chilling.

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