Cheap Born on the Fourth of July (DVD) (Tom Cruise) (Oliver Stone) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Born on the Fourth of July

Powerful Acting, Phenomenal True Story!
After movies like TOP GUN and DAYS OF THUNDER, Tom Cruise really proved himself as a serious actor in this powerful role. I can't imagine anyone else playing it better. Ron Kovic's brilliant autobiographical portrait is brought to life on the screen by acclaimed director Oliver Stone. While the Vietnam War is integral to the plot, the movie really illustrates what happened to our country during the Sixties, shown through the eyes of a paralyzed Vietnam veteran. His touching struggle to make peace with God, himself, his family, and his country are powerfully portrayed. While I disagree with some of the politics of the movie, I can not deny its excellence or its effect on how I view the Vietnam War. Should be required viewing by every high schooler. A masterpiece!

---

The best movie yet about the Vietnam War
Oliver Stone's second entry in his intended Vietnam trilogy (the first being the extraordinary and revisionist Platoon, the last the under-whelming Heaven and Earth) is a powerful, moving and politically uncompromising adaptation of Ron Kovic's autobiography of the same name. Charting Kovic's transition from blindly patriotic, gung-ho high school senior to bitter, cynical war veteran and anti-war activist, Stone paints a convincing and depressing portrait of a generation betrayed by their political leaders, leaving you emotionally devastated and politically angry. A totally disarming career best performance by Cruise, who - in any other year - would have walked away with the Oscar for Best Actor (as it was at the time, he was up against the world's greatest living actor, Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot). Weighed down slightly by an ill-judged and arguably unnecessary diversion into Kovic's drinking, whoring and cussing experience of Mexico. Such is the power of the rest of the film, that the indulgence hardly costs it a deserved five stars. Cruise's performance is undoubtedly the heart of the movie and he delivers impressively with a performance of unexpected maturity and depth. Stone reinforces a convincing claim to being one of the last true remaining auteurs of American cinema. Long may he continue to shake the mainstream out of its complacency.

---

THEY ALWAYS BLAME AMERICA FIRST
In 1989 Oliver Stone came out with "Born on the Fourth of July", the true story of Ron Kovic, a gung-ho Marine who is paralyzed in combat in Vietnam. The film is realistic and compelling. Stone is a master and Tom Cruise as Kovic gives one of his best-ever performances, proving him to be a bona fide acting talent. The film depicts the heartbreaking American experience in Vietnam, and the character arc of Kovic is as complete as any ever captured. He returns home, desperate to believe that his sacrifice was in a noble cause, but this is chipped away by the well-known elements of '60s radicalism. The "generation gap" between longhaired youths and crew cut, religious parents is profound. Kovic sinks into the depravity of drugs and alcohol, but battles back to become a "hero" of the anti-war Left. He wheels into the 1972 Republican National Convention, where he tries to tell the clean-cut, well-heeled patriots that they are wrong and he is right. The idea is that they are all warmongers who have not fought, while he is a pacifist because he has. While there is truth to the premise, in choosing to tell this story, Stone establishes Hollywood as the home of solidly liberal ideas. In 1972, Nixon won 49 states over the ant-war McGovern. The idea that all those Americans, subject daily to reports from Peter Arnett and Dan Rather, the bias of Walter Cronkite, and the hate of the New York Times and the Washington Post, chose Nixon because they were bloodthirsty imperialists is just malarkey. Furthermore, Nixon had made 18-year olds eligible to vote. The concept that all of American youth protested in the streets is a myth. The anti-war movement was propped by TV that made pockets of outrage look like a widespread movement. The Silent Majority spoke out in '72. Big time.
Stone's depiction is fair in and of itself, but he takes advantage of the power of his medium in creating a mindset that such horrors as Kovic experienced are just part of the "Vietnam experience." Kovic's life mirrors soldiers going back to the Roman Legion and beyond. The Left has taken Vietnam as one of those core issues and stuck to it, just as they found themselves wedded to Alger Hiss, Bill Clinton and now the losing side of the War on Terrorism. McCarthy was going after genuine Communists, and genuine Communists were trying to enslave South Vietnam. It took some fighting to stop them. Nixon and Kissinger had the best plan available to them at the time, and the public recognized it. Watergate killed them and the Democrats used it to abandon our allies. Millions died because of them. Democrats will have you believe that we "created" the "killing fields." They have to say things like that, to cling to this nebulous theory, somehow unable to blame the rabid haters and murderers of Communist history, apparently because they are wedded to McCarthyism. Their movies are their best tool in perpetuating their lies. Not on my watch.

STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
STWRITES@AOL.COM