9/13/2023 0 Comments Southside with you free movie![]() ![]() There, in the film, they get to know each other a little better: She hates pie, but loves ice cream. The Obamas had their historic first meal together by the fountain in the Art Institute’s courtyard, although the film shows them eating sandwiches in a park. ![]() In the video, her husband smirks at the memory and addresses the men out there watching: “Art, guys out there-it impresses people.” ![]() He showed his cultural side, and then we took a nice long walk down Michigan Avenue.” He was showing me all facets of his character. “It was a cool date, actually,” Michelle admitted years later in a White House promo video the couple posted to Obama’s YouTube page. But both the president and the first lady agree that taking that gallery detour was a pretty smooth move. We may not know what artwork the Obamas bonded over that day. In the film an angry Michelle relents, then is impressed when the young, smooth-talking Obama drops serious knowledge about the work of African-American actor and painter Ernie Barnes and his iconic “Sugar Shack.” But first, the movie says, he hustled her into a pre-meeting stop at the Art Institute of Chicago to take in an art exhibit. The ostensible purpose of Michelle and Barack’s “date” was to attend a community meeting on the South Side as colleagues. David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Making of the Man confirms at least that yes, Obama drove a terribly beat-up yellow Datsun, one that did indeed have a hole in its floorboard, He’d bought the car for $500 after returning to the States from his soul-searching stint in Europe and Africa. Was he also, as Southside with You suggests, instantly flirty, looking Michelle up and down like a starving man seeing food for the first time in his life? I’d like to think so (although only President Obama knows the real truth). “I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in, so I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people,” she said. To Obama: From Promise to Power author David Mendell, Michelle explained her apprehension at the young chain-smoking biracial charmer from Hawaii. Michelle was assigned to mentor the 27-year-old Obama during his stint as the firm’s summer associate-and by many accounts was determined not to date him. According to a Washington Post profile, she’d told her mother that summer that she was going to focus on her career and not worry too much about dating. Michelle, a hard-working and ambitious black female lawyer in a company and field dominated by white men, had graduated cum laude from Princeton and parlayed her Harvard JD into a gig at Chicago’s Sidley Austin law firm. Like many a legendary first date, the Obamas’ still very meme-worthy romance began as something… not quite official. Premiering the indie in January at Sundance to an audience of overwhelmingly charmed critics (guilty as charged- read my review here), director Tanne admitted that “the trajectory of the date,” pieced together from public record and interviews, is “about 90 percent accurate.” Warm performances by star-producer Tika Sumpter and newcomer Parker Sawyers carry the film, which is highlighted by Sawyers’s spitting likeness to the real Obama and his ability to nail the 44th POTUS’s effortlessly charismatic swag. But how legit is this piece of presidential bio-fiction? It is impossibly adorable and, frankly, will be irresistible catnip to fans of the exiting Obamas. ![]() That day is the subject of writer-director Richard Tanne’s romantic drama Southside with You, in which White House lore becomes Tinseltown legend as the first couple’s first date unfolds over the course of one epic walk ’n’ talk, a la Before Sunrise. In the summer of 1989, future history books will teach the children of the world, 25-year-old Chicago lawyer Michelle Robinson reluctantly went on a non-date-date with a cute Harvard Law student named Barack Obama that changed America. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |