Word: fourth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...making Top Gun. He played serious pool for eight weeks before The Color of Money. For Cocktail he tended bar in Manhattan. He plays a race-car driver in his next movie, Days of Thunder, a spin-off from Cruise's latest perilous hobby. But for Born on the Fourth of July he faced a different challenge: spending almost a year sporadically in a wheelchair, as Ron Kovic...
Whereas Platoon had news value, Born on the Fourth of July tells a familiar story; it wants to teach us what we already know. The movie's uniqueness is in its tone. Stone plays director as if he were at a cathedral organ with all the stops out. Each scene, whether it means to elegize or horrify, is unrelenting, unmodulated, rabid with its own righteousness. And yet, frequently, the crazy machine works because of its voluptuous imagery. When Ron is wounded in Viet Nam, he collapses backward, and from his mouth a stream of blood spurts like the fountain...
...Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to play actor's Ping- Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real...
...thinking, 'I don't know how it's going to be, but all I know is, I have got absolutely nothing left.' I was burned out. Burned out. But when I think back to the happiest moments in my life, I think of when we finished Born on the Fourth of July. You're looking down from the mountain and saying, 'Jesus, I had no idea it was this big.' I love that feeling of conclusion, accomplishment, overcoming obstacles...
...danced like a dynamo in Risky Business, swaggered through the sky in Top Gun and held his own against Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Cruise is Hollywood's biggest attraction, and he is about to be acclaimed one of its best actors. In Born on the Fourth of July, he displays rage and range as Viet Nam veteran Ron Kovic. For the engaging, intense young star, life has never been sweeter...