Larry Crowne and a Side Observation

Larry Crowne seemed even to be promoted good-naturedly as a light weight Summer movie -- no ground broken, little ripple in life experience. It achieved that I think. I would agree with many reviewers that it rated between 5 and 6 on a 10 point scale.
But there were two things I thought were interesting to dig into:
One, I liked the on-going garage sale of his neighbor. It appealed to my eBay forays!
Two, the character Steve Dibiasi, played by Rami Malek, is an interesting contrast to the character, "Snafu," also played by Malek in The Pacific HBO series. Did Hanks purposely cast him in the two roles to highlight the different paths of young people in 2011 and 1941? One wonders: would Malek's offbeat Snafu have been just a "character" like Dibiasi, if Snafu had stayed home in New Orleans and rode his bicycle and goofed off with his friends and been a bit out of touch with reality instead of enlisting when America went to war in 1941?
Even with a war in Afghanistan and operations globally by the military, young people today do not go off to enlist in the huge masses experienced in World War II. Will the peace experienced by most shape the country more positively in the long-run? Will crises that increased religious fervor during World War II and after be by-passed, and will other life experiences draw folks today to the Church?