Easter Sunday – Review

Easter Sunday – Review
96 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by Kate Angelo and Ken Cheng
Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

**NOTE: Enjoy this brief look at Mark’s thoughts below, and you can read Ryan’s review HERE. Then, have watch or listen as they discuss Easter Sunday as part of this week’s episode along with Prey and Luck.**

Synopsis:

Set around a family gathering to celebrate Easter Sunday, the comedy is based on Jo Koy’s life experiences and stand-up comedy.

Jo Koy has been doing standup for years now, and it only seems logical that he would eventually wind up headlining a movie. It’s what successful comedians do in Hollywood: they adapt the most successful aspects of their acts to craft an overall narrative.

In Easter Sunday‘s case, that movie is about comedian “Jo Valencia (Koy),” once the face of a beer ad (with catchphrase!), but now relegated to trying to land a TV pilot.

Like all things Hollywood, of course, the suits want him as second banana to the lead, and worse, they want him to do it with the effected Filipino accent he puts on when talking about his mother and family in his standup.

Typical, am I right?

But life isn’t simple for anyone, and hustling standups bucking for TV stardom are no exception. With an ex-wife with primary custody of his teenage son, a fractured relationship with that son because of all the traveling he does for standup, and a mother who is insistent–and relentless–in her desire for Jo to drive 5 hours up the California coast for Easter Sunday with the family, it ain’t easy.

Fashioned after Koy’s real family and events, Easter Sunday is a family comedy built around a Filipino family. While it often plays like simply a train of standup bits coming at you in quick succession.

The difference between Easter Sunday and other films of standup roots is that everyone has a family, and this string of bits serves a purpose, and that purpose is to remind you that we all have a family, and that no matter how often or infrequently we may see them, they’re still our family.

We all that a cousin who our parents seems to love more than us, an aunt or uncle who seems more supportive of us than our parents, but mostly a lot of love behind any disagreements.

Jo Koy navigates all of that here in Easter Sunday. Trying to support his son, keep a career, make his mom (and by extension, the rest of the family) happy by playing peacemaker is too much for anyone to handle without a sense of humor.

Thankfully, Jo Koy has that in spades. The supporting cast is great, especially Tia Carrere as his “Tita (aunt) Theresa” and Eva Noblezada as a “traditional” Filipina girl who befriends Jo’s son, Junior, who was raised in Beverly Hills with his (American) mom, away from the madness that is the Filipina family dynamic.

Junior is going through a bit of a culture shock in Daly City, lol.

**Noblezada also voices “Sam” in the Apple TV+ original film Luck. You can read my review of that HERE.**

Basically, if you have a family, you’ll enjoy Easter Sunday. You’ll see people you know, interactions you recognize, and dinners you’d kill to be at.

You might not recognize the pseudo-gangster invading your house, though. But you will recognize the “no one messes with our family but our family” vibe.

Cousin Eugene puts it all very succinctly in that “Family is mad complicated.”

Ain’t it, though?

A smile-fest from start to finish, even in the (familial-ly) exasperating parts.

Easter Sunday hits theaters on Friday, Augst 5, and stars Jo Koy, Lydia Gaston, Brandon Wardell, Eva Noblezada, Carly Pope, Tia Carrere, Melody Butiu, Joey Guila, Rodney To, Eugene Cordero, Tiffany Haddish, and Lou Diamond Phillips.

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