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| Born on the Fourth of July | 
 enlarge | Category: Movie
Buy New: $2.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  84 reviews
Sales Rank: 2626
Media: Video On Demand
Running Time: 145
ASIN: B000ICXQR4
Theatrical Release Date: December 19, 1989
Release Date: October 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 THEY ALWAYS BLAME AMERICA FIRST June 7, 2004
5 out of 15 found this review helpful
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
 Rent it...and you'll want to buy it April 5, 2004
Im not big on directors or actors; i love a movie with a great story, and an important message. But...BoTFoJ is a great movie because it has an amazing combination of all four elements. Oliver Stone did a superb job, Tom Cruise becomes Ron Kovic, the story is great (and the fact that it is based on real events makes it that much better), and what can i say about the message: truly remarkable. I must admit, the movie starts fast, then slows down for a while, until about the last 30 minutes of the movie. That's when all the loose ends start to come together, and you really feel the full effect of the movie's message. Im not going to give a run down of what it is...that would ruin the best part of the movie for all of you. I mean, the message is subtle in a lot of ways. You just have to look a little deeper, look back upon the movie's events, and think about how it all relates to the ending. I think for those of you that want a movie that has something to say about the hypocritical basis of the Vietnam War (and U.S. self-perpetuated myths), take a look at BoTFoJ. One of my favourites for sure.
Wow April 3, 2004
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
To sum it all up....I cant believe Cruise didnt win the Academy Award for this one. Just an incredible performance.
 Not quite sure about this one. November 1, 2003
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
I finally watched this after hearing my mom hype it for years. I have always understood it to be a war movie - but it isn't, not in the traditional sense of the word. There are about 10 minutes of war footage in this movie. The rest is (prior) about Ron's growing up loving to fight and being patriotic, and (after) Ron's adjustment to life and redefining patriotism.There is one problem with the DVD - the case says it's 1 hour and 25 minutes long. I have been watching for 2 hours and there's no end in sight. I'll save the end of it for another day, but beware if you think it's a quick watch.
Haunting and distrubing, but ultimately redemptive October 23, 2003
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
I avoided this when it came out in 1989 having seen Coming Home (1978) and not wanting to revisit the theme of paraplegic sexual dysfunction and frustration. I also didn't want to reprise the bloody horror of our involvement in the war in Vietnam that I knew Oliver Stone was going to serve up. And Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic? I just didn't think it would work.Well, my preconceptions were wrong. First of all, for those who think that Tom Cruise is just another pretty boy (which was basically my opinion), this movie sets that mistaken notion to rest. He is nothing short of brilliant in a role that is enormously demanding--physically, mentally, artistically, and emotionally. I don't see how anybody could play that role and still be the same person. Someday in his memoirs, Tom Cruise is going to talk about being Ron Kovic as directed by Oliver Stone. And second, Stone's treatment of the sex life of Viet Vets in wheelchairs is absolutely without sentimentality or silver lining. There are no rose petals and no soft pedaling. There was no Jane Fonda, as in Coming Home, to play an angel of love. Instead the high school girl friend understandably went her own way, and love became something you bought if you could afford it. And third, Stone's depiction of America--and this movie really is about America, from the 1950s to the 1970s--from the pseudo-innocence of childhood war games and 4th of July parades down Main street USA to having your guts spilled in a foreign land and your brothers-in-arms being sent home in body bags--was as indelible as black ink on white parchment. He takes us from proud moms and patriotic homilies to the shameful neglect in our Veteran's hospitals to the bloody clashes between anti-war demonstrators and the police outside convention halls where reveling conventioneers wave flags and mouth phony slogans. I have seen most of Stone's work and as far as fidelity to authentic detail and sustained concentration, this is his best. There are a thousand details that Stone got exactly right, from Dalton Trumbo's paperback novel of a paraplegic from WW I, Johnny Got His Gun, that sat on a tray near Kovic's hospital bed, to the black medic telling him that there was a more important war going on at the same time as the Vietnam war, namely the civil rights movement, to a mother throwing her son out of the house when he no longer fulfilled her trophy case vision of what her son ought to be, to Willem DaFoe's remark about what you have to do sexually when nothing in the middle moves. Also striking were some of the scenes. In particular, the confession scene at the home of the boy Kovic accidentally shot; the Mexican brothel scene of sex/love desperation, the drunken scene at the pool hall bar and the pretty girl's face he touches, and then the drunken, hate-filled rage against his mother, and of course the savage hospital scenes--these and some others were deeply moving and likely to haunt me for many years to come. Of course, as usual, Oliver Stone's political message weighed heavily upon his artistic purpose. Straight-laced conservatives will find his portrait of America one-sided and offensive and something they'd rather forget. But I imagine that the guys who fought in Vietnam and managed to get back somehow and see this movie, will find it redemptive. Certainly to watch Ron Kovic, just an ordinary Joe who believed in his country and the sentiments of John Wayne movies and comic book heroics, go from a depressed, enraged, drug-addled waste of a human being to an enlightened, focused, articulate, and ultimately triumphant spokesman for the anti-war movement, for veterans, and the disabled was wonderful to see. As Stone reminds us, Kovic really did become the hero that his misguided mother dreamed he would be. No other Vietnam war movie haunts me like this one. There is something about coming back less than whole that is worse than not coming back at all that eats away at our consciousness. And yet in the end there is here displayed the triumph of the human will and a story about how a man might find redemption in the most deplorable of circumstances.
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