By Kai Curry
Northwest Asian Weekly
In Jo Koy’s “Easter Sunday,” released in theaters Aug. 5, a family gathers to celebrate this most sacred of Catholic holidays. Most of them have been “guilted” into being there by the moms and would “rather be someplace else,” yet are reminded throughout the course of the day how important family is. In fact, it’s divine. Just like the creepy baby Jesus on the mantelpiece.
(Disclaimer: I don’t find the baby Jesus creepy, but it is hilarious how they demonstrate that the statue’s eyes follow you. Koy does an entire bit at the altar during Easter Sunday mass that could be as controversial as Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video, depending upon your leanings.)
When I was in high school, I spent every weekend at a friend’s house, where her Filipino mom would make a feast of food, regardless of whether it’s for two or 20 people. Every school excursion, we were packing lumpia. Food plays a big part in any family that gathers to celebrate a holiday, and the spreads that the moms and aunties come up with in “Easter Sunday” are amazing, but enjoying that food is not all warm and fuzzy. It’s also a subject of contention and competition.
Jo Koy plays Joe Valencia (basically himself). His mom, Tita Susan, played by Lydia Gaston, and her sister, Tita Teresa, played by Tia Carrere, fight constantly over whose recipe was whose or whose empanadas are better. Their rivalry is so bitter you’d think somebody killed somebody, but no, it’s “just” the food. I had a sense of this one-upmanship amongst the Filipino community when I was in high school. At kids’ birthday gatherings, the competition was almost palpable.
While the constant in-fighting in “Easter Sunday” threatens to ruin their holiday, it is also viewed as mostly an acceptable and even endearing part of a “mad complicated Filipino family.” According to Joe’s son Junior’s (Brandon Wardell) new love interest, Tala (Eva Noblezada), they are as “extra” as an order of halo halo. As in many close families, there’s always something brewing. There’s always at least one kooky uncle—in this case, Arthur (Rodney To), a postman who wears a utility belt of weapons under his suit—and at least one cousin up to no good.
The cousin is Eugene (Eugene Cordero), who owes money to north Cali gangster, “Dev Deluxe” (Asif Ali), for a truck full of luxury goods. I could have done without the action movie side bit. I get that it took Joe away from the festivities for most of the day, and allowed the family, including Junior, to criticize him even more for being an absent father. Koy plays a comedian hoping to get a TV series, so he’s always on call waiting for the next opportunity. One of the first jokes is when his mom, Teresa, complains, “We are all nurses. There are no clowns.” It’s part of a running joke about the abundance of Filipino nurses in the healthcare community.
As usual, the TV executives want to meet at whatever is the most inconvenient time. And somehow even a car chase ensues, the last thing you would expect from a family holiday movie. The shenanigans also give Tala the opportunity to school Junior—who lives in LA, goes to private school, and carries a fancy “real” camera (not just snapping photos on his iPhone)—on how privileged he is, and how hard his father is working for Junior’s benefit.
I totally got the job part, but the running around trying to foil gangsters’ part is not the usual type of scenario for most hard-working fathers. I wondered what the movie would have done with itself without this distracting subplot, the coolest parts of which were the street race where Joe kicked butt in a Subaru (the policewoman who catches them, a former girlfriend played by Tiffany Haddish, said she’d expected the car to be driven by “two ladies and a labradoodle”). There is also the Filipino pride involved in a pair of Manny Pacquiao’s boxing gloves (How is the PacMan not the President of the Philippines?).
In general, this is a movie about Filipino pride and the over-long chance for Filipino actors to play their own ethnicity. In an interview sponsored by Gold House, Carrere said with relief that it “feels like I finally can be myself…After 40 years in this business.” She talked about how when she was on General Hospital, there was an “Asian” cast contingent and “never any differentiation between each Asian background.” To be in “Easter Sunday” and “represent our Asian-ness, our Filipino-ness, was not even a thought. Thank you, Jo, for getting us up to bat.”
Another old school actor who has played multiple ethnicities but never Filipino is Lou Diamond Phillips, who shows up as himself in this movie.
“Tia and I have similar experiences. There just weren’t these roles for us…It’s an arrival for the Filipino community,” Phillips said. “As Asians, we finally raised our hand. We’re so used to being so polite and so quiet. But now I think we were in a place…where we can own our own power, we can own our own voice, and we can put it out there…That’s why this film is more important…that’s what makes it a cultural touchstone.”
There’s a running joke in the movie that Filipinos are usually mistaken for Mexicans.
Teresa’s neighbor tells her to watch out what she says in Tagalog because he can understand “40%.” Mistaken identity is painfully funny when you think about how rare it has been in U.S. cinema history for a Filipino actor to actually play a Filipino, or for us to even know if a celebrity is Filipino at all. Koy’s character encounters a great deal of stereotyping and racism in his struggles to earn a living on the stage and in television.
Throughout “Easter Sunday,” he is fighting with his agent and the TV producers to get a job without having to do an accent.
Koy talked to Gold House about how important representation was to him growing up, and how much he cherished the chance to see Carrere or Phillips on the screen. As a kid, he was “just trying to find something that represents me, that looks like me…and every time something kind of looked like it, I was like, ‘That’s a Filipino!’ …It was me being able to hold my flag up, [and say], ‘That’s me on the screen.’”
He also spoke of the experience his mother had when she came to the United States, and how thrilled he is to have had this chance to make “Easter Sunday” with a “dream team” of Filipino actors.
“You never think that something like this is going to happen…My mom, she came in 1969 when there was just no representation, no identity…When my mom looked for other Filipinos, she would literally have to look for other Filipinos. She didn’t go to IG. There was no Facebook…She was just by herself looking for people that looked like her and walking up to them, ‘Filipino?’ ‘Mexican.’ ‘Oh sorry.’ As funny as that is, that was our reality. For her and me to see this happen now? That’s our family. This is our people.”
Kai can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.