After all, should the so called independent media call the soldiers on one side of the conflict "heroes" as CNN reporters often do any chance they get, especially on Veterans' and Memorial Days?
Much of this proceeds in amusing slapstick fashion, often based on the fact that Marco plies his trade as smuggler, enforcer and conflicted hero while using a wheelchair.
The real reason we should pity Winkler is that his name conjures up the salty, conflicted heroes of Bellow, Roth, Bashevis Singer, characters whom he and Coren can only fail to live up to.
At times Mr. Akhtar seems also to be putting a modern Muslim spin on earlier stories of Jewish assimilation; his yearning and conflicted young hero suggests a PG-13 version of a Philip Roth character or a more repressed version of Eugene Jerome, Neil Simon's alter ego in "Brighton Beach Memoirs".
Surely one of the earliest Hollywood films to concern itself with the war in Indochina, this preview of coming attractions for America's involvement in Vietnam is centered on a typically conflicted Fuller hero: Gene Barry as a Korean War veteran named Brock, who has turned mercenary to join the French forces fighting the Viet Minh.
Watching a movie like Lone Survivor, I can't help thinking about issues like these, and with something as weighty and dire as war, painting every American conflict as "heroes defending our freedom" does a disservice to the victims of war as well as those fighting them.
Family members who take on the around-the-clock role of caring for injured loved ones after they return from war are the conflicts' unsung heroes.
Any story needs conflict, and any hero--Milk, notwithstanding a certain fey nebbishness, is a hero--needs an antagonist.
Despite the mega-tonne nature of the conflict, our HUMAN heroes have yet to sustain even a scratch.
Most pointedly, the cold-blooded executions punctuating the drama are carried out by the brothers themselves, each one dwelling upon the brutalising tragedy of a conflict that turns heroes into killers, oppressors into victims.
