This Weekend on Cable: USA! USA! USA!

So -- Fourth of July and all that. If you're looking for movies, you could go all orthodox and sit through 1776 again, or you could also hunt down alternative histories, dark underbellies and political handgrenades. Read on for nine hints where to look, and set your DVR's accordingly.

Born on the Fourth of July (Encore Drama, Sunday @ 11:50 AM & 8:00 PM)

This might be the Independence Day movie we all need (even Obama), a mega-dose of Oliver Stone's soured patriotism in which Tom Cruise -- as autobiographer Ron Kovic -- goes to Vietnam a flag-waving brat and comes back a maimed wreck.

Meet Me in St. Louis (TCM, Saturday @ 8:00 PM)

A safe all-American choice and a multiple-holiday lock across the board, this 1944 Vincente Minnelli musical is just about it's decade's most charming, nuanced, history-rich musical (set in 1904, around the World's Fair), and possibly the best American musical ever made. It's certainly the least annoying.

Southern Comfort (IFC, Sunday @ 12:00 midnight)

Dumbass military action doesn't get much more like kids playing King of the Hill than in this 1981 Walter Hill fit of cynicism, in which a gaggle of idiot Louisiana Guardsman run afoul of Cajuns in the swamplands and get hunted like so much meat. Powers Boothe is the savvy out-of-towner, but he's doomed by his compatriots, including Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, T.K. Carter and Franklyn Seales.

1984 (Retroplex, Friday @ 9:50 PM)

It's good to distrust power, right? George Orwell's cautionary tale about a futuristic fascist England is done right by director Michael Radford, down to the film's deliberately antiquated visual style -- an incarnation of the future as seen from 1948. John Hurt is Winston Smith (looking exactly like Samuel Beckett -- coincidence?), Richard Burton is the government's voice of persuasion, and the rats play themselves.

The Right Stuff (Retroplex, Sunday @ 4:45 PM)

Philip Kaufman's 1983 epic comedy about the painful, backwards birth of the U.S. space program is as American as a kid holding onto a lit cherry bomb. It made Dennis Quaid a star, but the historical stunt-casting is brilliant, from Ed Harris as John Glenn to Donald Moffat as Lyndon Johnson. And oh yeah: Sam Shepard was nominated for an Oscar as Chuck Yeager.

The Neistat Brothers (HBO, Friday @ 12:00 midnight)

As close to DIY underground filmmaking as HBO is likely to ever get, this nascent, charmingly childish series chronicles the adventures of the two filmmaking brothers, who make films out of whatever's around -- animated craft supplies, themselves, etc. The "films" are largely "about" their own production and the home-movie shenanigans surrounding them, so it's hard to say what the show "is," precisely.

Dinner Rush (IFC, Saturday @ 11:00 AM & 5:15 PM)

Set almost entirely inside a busy, up-scale Tribeca eatery, Bob Giraldi's movie is an impressively deft recreation of a queasily familiar space, complete with industrial decor, hectic kitchen chaos, track-lighting casualties and a population of self-obsessed, hyper-sophisticated bullshit artists. Tension mounts as the film's evening presses on, merely by virtue of the restaurant's everyday attempt to avoid collapsing into mayhem while concocting white-truffle this and lemon grass that. But there are mobsters, gargoyle food critics (Sarah Bernhard), obnoxious diners, savvy waitresses (Summer Phoenix making a dent), etc., and the Altmanesque weave is deft.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Sundance, Saturday @ 10:00 PM & 4:00 AM)

Speaking of dinner: Luis Buñuel's 1972 masterpiece serenely takes the surreal premise of his earlier film The Exterminating Angel (diners cannot leave a mansion's dining room, for weeks, and no one knows why), and inverses it. Here, six cool European sophisticates try again and again to sit down to dinner but are constantly being halted by absurd and nightmarish interruptions, including machine-gun-firing terrorists. Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stephane Audran lead the pack, and although it's got nothing to do with the holiday, it is a semi-highbrow party film, and without question one of the greatest -- funniest, most mysterious, resonant -- films ever made.

Our Man Flint (Fox Movie Channel, Saturday @ 2:00 AM)

The thing about the Austin Powers films is that they were satirizing something that was already satirizing something else -- namely, the Flint series starring James Coburn. Ribbing the Bond films, Flint began with this 1966 Cold War spy spoof before graduating to In Like Flint (1967), which follows on FMC at 4:00 AM. They aren't, frankly, as funny, but they got there first.