“Not A Pretty Picture.”  Vol.34; No. 4; Pg. 68; ISSN: 0001-4508

“I think that V.A. hospital care throughout the United States is second rate.  I think veterans from all wars are still treated in an insensitive and callous fashion and I think that there is still a great need for a national investigation of all V.A. hospitals and a complete reevaluation of the V.A. procedure.”  Ron talks about his feeling on Vietnam with in an interview where he expresses his true feelings and how realistic the movie really is.  “The Bronx scenes in the movie were realistic depictions of what actually happened to me and others upon our return.” This article gives us sense of how realistic the movie was.  Despite the talk that this movie was a stretch from the truth, this article clarifies first hand that it isn’t. 
 
 

Kauffmann, Stanley.  “Born on the Fourth of July. Movie reviews.” 

This article is a negative review about the movie, Born on the Fourth of July.  The author Kauffmann feels Stone “skips the change itself, the ideational climax.” The author feels that Stone doesn’t show the change Ron makes from the “gung-ho volunteer-and-veteran into an anti-war activist.”  We see the veteran whose response to any criticism of America is “love it or leave it,” but we don’t see a direct change in his opinion.  Stone shows us Ron in his chair, visiting his high school sweetheart, later in Mexico, etc.  After the whole Mexico episode Ron definitely changes.  We see him try, with other anti-war activists, to enter the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972 to present his anti-war views.  (We see a sequence of anger on both sides--anti-war, and war supporters) And four years later, at the close, we see Ron wheeling toward the platform to address the Democratic convention.  Without this capstone, in the Kauffmann’s opinion “the film is a series of segments, without architectural completion.”