Little Boy (GAM021)

### Starring:

Jacob Salvati, Emily Watson, David Henrie, Michael Rapaport, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Tom Wilkinson, Kevin James

## Hosts

Noah Lugeons

Heath Enwright

Eli Bosnick

***Little Boy*** is based on the true story of how Jesus changed the outcome of World War II by giving magical powers to an eight year old kid, except it's a bit more racist than that actual story. Imagine if Bizarro Spike Lee made a racist propaganda film in the 1940s about American relations with Japan—it's like half war movie, and half that.

### **Opening Phrase**

Where each week we sample another selection from Christian cinema in a futile effort to find the good one.

### **How Bad Was It?**

This movie is surprisingly bad: it's not badly acted, it's not badly shot, it's *kinda* badly written, but the ideas behind it are so insidious that it makes up for the fact that somehow they got real actors and real cameramen and all that stuff. The ideas behind it are so poisonous that this could have been Nicholson's *Chinatown*, and you still would have looked at this and gone, "Yeah, this isn't an good film."

### **Notes**

* Kevin James liked this script so much that he agreed to appear for free.
* The Asian character is announced with a *gong*.

### **Jokes**

* "And then out of nowhere the fat German kid from *Willie Wonka*, he yells out 'Stop fucking up the shot, midget!' Like, really mean, and everybody laughs—grown adults included, are laughing at this. Granted, that term wasn't established as the equivalent of the n-word for little people back in the forties, but still, pretty bad. And as we're going to find out (spoiler), they *will* continue to ramp up the hate speech. Oh, but if you're wondering 'Hey, at any point is someone going to point out the insensitivity of the word midget?' Oh, several characters—several characters who will later go on the say 'Jap', 'nip', 'gook'... over and over and over again. It's madness. It's like the SJW but only on one side: 'Hey man, they prefer "little person." Can you check your ableism? Anyways, this Jap nippy mother fucker over here, this slant mother fucker… Sucker suckee, three dollars! You know what I'm sayin.' Shit." (9:25)
* "So, now we get to the scene we've all been waiting for: he goes off to scream at Japan some more, and all the people in town start congratulating him. He doesn't know yet, but they've got the newspaper that tells them that Hiroshima was nuked. Now, the movie treats this like it's great—we get the kid smiling, riding his bike, waving to everybody in town—like he just found his Golden fucking ticket or something. Someone runs up to him and goes 'Listen! We have the best news!" That's how they're talking about the bombing of Hiroshima. Now, this movie was *not* made in 1946, right? I think we should reflect on the fact that this was made like two fucking years ago. We *know* now, you know? Back then, it's kind of forgivable, 'Yeah, okay… it ended the war' but we know what a horrible terrible fucking thing… have *some* type of sensitivity. But no, we get the kid riding around to 'I'm Gonna Let It Shine'! Everyone's like 'Yeah!', jumping in the air, and I was like like 'Oh my God, if we have a cut to the fucking explosion, I'm going to shit in my pants and eat it.' *And we do*. We cut out directly from 'I'm Gonna Let It Shine' to video of nuclear explosion. It's never happened before in the history of cinema." (1:16:28)
* "And you've gotta imagine—I just want to throw this out there—Japanese people saw this movie. Someone Japanese… the country of Japan *existed* in 2014, which means that this was… someone *saw* this. This is like a Holocaust celebration. This is like if Kristallnacht was in a German movie and the kid was like 'Hooray! Now I can have the candlesticks because the window's broken!' It's fucking crazy." (1:18:49)

### **Interstitials**

* Cinematic Suggestions for the Makers of *Little Boy* eg. *The Hope of Nanjing* (6:25)
* "Hate crimes and vicious racism don't matter as long as you couch everything in some gee-golly aw-shucks Norman Rockwell-isms." (54:47)

### **Tropes**

* Behind on the Rent
* Coincidence Treated Like a Miracle
* Conspicuous American Flag
* Disappointing Christian Celebrity
* Name That Movie
* RACISM!
* Sentenced to Christianity
* World Without Black People

### **Links**

* Episode on Audioboom
* Film on YouTube
* IMDB