Why isn't this on DVD yet? "Meet Me In St. Louis" is a 1940s look back to a year in the life of the Smith Family of St. Louis, the year preceding the 1904 World's Fair. This movie is visually stunning. The Technicolor photography and the camera setups are amazing (the late-night candle distinguishing is all one shot), a testiment to the talent of Vincente Minnelli and his wonderful cast, particularly his soon-to-be wife Judy Garland, who was at her most beautiful and could transform any song into something magical.

Garland gives generously to her costar, Margaret O'Brien, a sort of Shirley Temple for the forties, who is nothing short of brilliant as the morbid youngest daughter Tootie, with the fascination for "dead" dolls. Her Halloween scene is remarkable and hilarious. The minimalist plot--Will Dad take the job in New York? Will Esther marry the boy next door, John Truitt? Will Rose wind up an old maid, like Katie?--never gets in the way of the lavish staging of the musical numbers. "The Trolley Song" is like a great music video, and "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" is still a standard. Great for the Holidays or any day, this movie is always sure to bring a smile. Watch for a very young June Lockhart ("Timmy and Lassie", "Lost in Space")as Lucille Ballard, the much-maligned New York socialite.

Meet Me In St. Louis is a lovely film, based on episodes in the life of a large family living in early 20th Century St. Louis at the time of the World's Fair. Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien are both amazing in this film and are very strongly supported by the rest of the cast.

My 6 year old daughter is hooked on it too now (and I guess that's about the age when I first saw it) and we often watch it together for a treat. I have watched it countless times and am always happy to watch it again.

Meet Me in St. Louis is essentially a "pastoral" musical that celebrates the values of small town America, a popular theme in MGM musicals, especially those directed by Minelli. The so-called delights of the big metropolis New York are exposed as undesirable and compared unfavorably with the simple "purer" family life of St. Louis - which is a big city too but "doesn't seem big, out here where we live".

But it is not just a chocolate box movie, in spite of the beautiful music, romantic theme and gorgeous costumes and photography. Of course it is full of great musical set pieces - such as The Trolley Song and Skip to My Lou - but it has many "dark episodes" as well. The best is when Vincente Minelli borrows very sucessfully from the horror genre for the Halloween scene, and the dark disturbing scene when the snow people are decapitated by Tudy who would rather destroy them rather than leave them behind for strangers. Also, I'm not sure what the two nuns at the Fair mean in the final scenes, but I'm sure they are significant because the camera focuses on them rather than the lead characters who are actually talking in that scene. Maybe I'll need to watch it a few hundred times more to decide.

"Meet Me In St. Louis" would have to be in my belief one of the most perfectly executed musicals to come out of Hollywood's golden age. While most attention always tends to go on praising "An American In Paris" and "Singin' In The Rain", both of which leave me largely cold, this film I feel is leagues ahead in quality of presentation, musical score and performances.

MGM the home of top quality musicals poured all of its creative talent both from behind and in front the camera, into making "Meet Me In St. Louis" the classic which it has become. The film relates the very simple story of a year in the life of the Smith family in St. Louis and all the trials and tribulations that each member experiences in the led up to the World's Fair. Starring the magical Judy Garland at the peak of her talents as Esther Smith and a superb supporting cast including child sensation Margaret O'Brien as the scene stealing Tootie Smith, veterans Mary Astor and Leon Ames as the Smith parents, and Margorie Main in the typical role of the no nonsense housekeeper Katie the film is overflowing with wonderful talent that gives the story their all. Indeed rarely has such a nostalgic look back at simple Americana been presented in so appealing a manner and as we get further away from thos eearlier simpler times I feel this movie grows in stature.

Produced by the famed Arthur Freed Unit at MGM and based on a short novel by Sally Benson the film cost a fortune to make in late 1943 and was a considerable gamble considering the uncertainty of how the war would turn out at that time. The risk was rewarded with a huge Box Office success that made "Meet Me In St. louis" one of the biggest hits in MGM's history. With the films lavish use of the most brilliant technicolour, the introduction of each new season within the borders of what appears like a beautiful illustrated greeting card, sumptuous sets and beautifully detailed costumes it without a doubt has been regarded as one of the most beautiful films produced by MGM during the 1940's and has become one of the great classics of any time. "Meet Me In St. Louis" provided Judy Garland with her most famous role after "The Wizard Of Oz" and amazingly she was at first very reluctant to do it as the character was a much younger woman than those she had been recently playing and she feared that she would be eternally trapped in the image of the young girl looking for love. Luckily the powers that be convinced her otherwise and she went on to create a sensation in the role of the young girl who develops a passion for the boy next door. Directed with his usual flair in the musical genre by the legendary Vincente Minnelli this is where the romance between Judy Garland andhimself began and it was continued into their next film together the outstanding drama "The Clock" resulting in marriage. Garland produced some of her finest work on film under Minnelli's direction and here she is never better where she is in turn sentimental, alive and a ball of energy. glowing with a rare beauty, and in beautiful voice to sing some of her classic trade mark songs created especially for this film. And what songs!!!. The classic "The Boy Next Door", "The Trolley Song", "Under The Bamboo Tree", and unforgettably the classic "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes like no other song you will hear. This is Garland at her shining best just before her own personal troubles began to interfere with her work leading to her being released from her contract by MGM in 1950.

The film contains so many wonderful sequences. One of my personal favourites is the famed Halloween scene which is dominated by wonderful child actress Margaret O'Brien in a scene stealing performance. Rather than just have Tootie depicted as a sweet child up to mischief they have shown her talking about all the fatal diseases her dolls are suffering from and how half of them are buried in the backyard!! Truly a delightful performance by who the critics dubbed "the pint sized Garbo". The wonderful section set during the Christmas season also helps make "Meet Me In St. Louis" such a special viewing experience. The lovely togetherness of the Smith family learning to cope with it being their last Christmas in their St. Louis home is touching and beautifully done. It's scenes such as these that make you really wonder where Hollywood's heart is nowadays as rarely do present day films touch me as much as this part of "Meet Me In St. Louis" succeeds in doing. Among the smaller roles Tom Drake is the perfect young leading man to play John Truett the eternal boy next door and the object of Esther's attention. He would be forever typed as this character and it is still the role Drake is best known for. Harry Davenport as Grandpa, June Lockhart as Lucille Ballard and Chill Wills as the iceman all round out a superb cast delivering their best in unforgettable roles.

For an enchanting excursion back to a time and place long gone from our present harder world "Meet Me In St. Louis" cannot be bettered. It is without a doubt one of the finest musicals ever produced and each screening brings out more joys to wonder at and experience. Enjoy some wonderful time with the Smith family of St Louis soon.

As an O'Reilly publication I was slightly disappointed with this book until I realized that most of the problem is probably due to the newness of the subject as opposed to quality of the authors and editors. The content is very good and covers quite a bit of programming ASP.Net applications. It gives solid coverage of a large number of topics. The biggest problem is the content is not much more than can be found in the ASP 'quick start tutorials' on the Microsoft site. Ease of reading and the examples being explained in significantly greater detail than the tutorials are the books greatest advantage over the tutorials - aside from being able to take it anywhere.

The 900 page book would probably fit into a little more than 500 pages if it weren't for the constant code duplication throughout. In the first few chapters every example (including the HTML) is duplicated in both C# and VB.NET. In later chapters they do not duplicate the HTML but much of the code is still shown in both languages. This is nice to be able to illustrate the differences between the two languages but it gets quite repetitious after the first few dozen times. I found myself skipping over large sections of repeated code where the biggest difference was in the trailing semi-colons. In a couple of cases I skipped over more than 10 pages befroe finding the code explanations. Even the small code snippets being expalined were often duplicated.

Over all it is a solid book and is useful in its more detailed explanations and samples. Despite the claim that no prior experience is needed with ASP pages it would definitely be a plus. If you are new to ASP.Net and want a good introductory text then this would be a solid book for you but it by no means should be your only book. I gave it four stars because only 3 would have been equal to a 6 on a 10 point scale and that would have been too low, a solid 3 1/2 is more realistic.

I have been asked to create a web application for my company, and I reviewed a number of books on ASP.NET (as well as ADO.NET). This is by far the best I've seen.

The coverage of the various controls is excellent, the examples are small and useful and really explain the material, and you can download the examples from the author's web site.

In addition, this book provides an excellent introduction to ADO.NET for ASP.NET, better than some dedicated books I looked at.

The book goes beyond the superficial, and really covers the issues you run into when writing an application. This is not a rehash of the existing documentation, but a guided tour through what it takes to create a working web application with ASP.NET.

I personally like C#, but it was interesting to see the code both in C# and in VB.NET. I feel like I learned VB.NET along the way, as a bonus, and I realize now how similar these languages really are. You can skip over the language you don't care about (all the examples are in both C# and in VB.NET) but it is fun to see how similar they are.

In any case, I highly recommend this book both for programmers with little ASP experience, and for more advanced programmers as well.

This book is simply excellent. It starts with the core fundamentals, and builds your expertise from there. Every aspect of ASP.NET is covered in detail.

The authors begin with a simple HTML based "hello world" program and quickly build up the asp.net capabilities. They show integrated code and the (preferred) code-behind. The event model is explained in detail. Each of the major controls is shown and the validation controls are described in detail. The authors also show debugging techniques and proper coding idioms.

Every example is shown in both VB.NET and C#, which I found very helpful. This helped me see the similarities in the language and clarified areas that might otherwise be confusing.

The book includes a lengthy section on interacting with data, including a primer on ADO.NET and list-bound controls. The section on custom and user controls is excellent.

They spend 3 chapters on Web Services, and provide a comprehensive overview of this topic.

Finally, the book is rounded out with chapters on caching and performance, security and deployment and configuration.

The writing is clear and crisp, and despite the fact that there are two authors, it reads as if written by just one. The material is delieverd with clarity, and the authors provide unbelievable support on their web site, where you can obtain the source code and also ask questions directly of the authors!

All in all, I was very impressed by this excellent introduction to ASP.NET, and I recommend it highly.

I am a "Bye Bye Birdie" convert. I never thought I'd watch this movie. I figured it was campy schlock, something I couldn't possibly enjoy. My boyfriend loves "Bye Bye Birdie," though, so I bought this DVD for him and *gasp* agreed to watch it with him one afternoon.

I was bracing myself for a cheesy, white, Christian, Republican, Lawrence Welk house of horrors, but 10 minutes into it, I discovered that I was completely wrong. It's a hilarious time capsule of 1960's middle-class America. The story is adorable, as is Ann-Margret. The songs are fun and extremely catchy. The entire cast is excellent, the score is great, and the dance numbers rock. I only wish the DVD had more extras, hence the subtraction of a star. Despite the lack of extra goodies, I'll be watching this one a lot with my boyfriend and anyone else I can convince to watch it.

This movie is an excellent time-capsule for the end of the late '50's/early'60's rock n' roll era. (It came out in 1963, just a few months before the Beatles hit our shores & changed everything forever.)

It's got everything:

An Elvis-like rock n' roll sex-machine on a motorcycle, check!

Cold War political satire, check!

A spoof of middle-class American values, check!

Young, gorgeous Ann-Marget, check & check again!

I was born too late to experience this time period & I haven't actually seen the Broadway original from 1960 with Chita Rivera in the Janet Leigh role. But this movie is a fast-paced, witty musical-comedy. I know the 1995 version sticks closer to the original story, but I think that version plays too much into the whole "nostalgia"-thing....an element that was NOT a part of any show actually made back then. That version was also slow & not very funny.

This version is great! A lot has been said about the music, but the comedy hasn't got much attention. The humor manages to be suggestive without being vulgar. It's kind of like reading an old issue of MAD Magazine, but this is acted out!

If you want laughs every second, great songs & great dancing, as well as a humorous glimpse as to what American attitudes were like back then, then this 1963 version is for you!

It's "Honestly Sincere!"

Bye Bye Birdie is a delicious slice of musical Americana from a seemingly far less complicated era - the early 1960's. Based on a hit Broadway musical, the story concerns the national upheaval occasioned by the drafting into the army of an Elvis-Presley type rock and roll star, Conrad Birdie. The film is a good-natured parody of rock and roll, publicity gimmicks, live television, the generation gap, and the teenage culture of the 1950's. This is the movie that made Ann Margret a star, and it does so quite brilliantly. The stage show was completely rewritten to showcase her in the comely role of Kim McAfee, the lucky Ohio teenager who gets to bestow a symbolic farewell kiss on Conrad Birdie as he departs for the service. Paul Lynde, (later familiar to TV audiences from his long, humorous reign in the Center Square on The Hollywood Squares) repeats his Broadway role as Kim's exasperated father and gets to immortalize his lament in the hilarious song "Kids"! Dick Van Dyke also reprises his Broadway role, charmingly paired with the versatile, often underrated, Janet Leigh. The film is colorful and cinematically innovative, the tuneful score well delivered by an able cast including teenie bopper idol Bobby Rydell. All in all, fun for the whole family, and viewed today, an enjoyable "period piece". (Incidentally, Conrad Birdie, for all his resemblance to Elvis Presley, seems to have been more closely modeled on the one-time rock and roller Conway Twitty, who later became a popular Country star). They don't make 'em like this anymore! No-strings cinematic fun! END