I’m on the record as hating traditional biopics, and this is certainly something different: Get On Up‘s Tika Sumpter is set to play Michelle Obama in a historical rom-dram called Southside With You, “a drama in the vein of Before Sunrise” chronicling Barry Obama’s first date with Michelle Robinson back in 1988. The indie feature from director Richard Tanne (Worst Friends, The Roman) is all set to go just as soon as they find someone to play the young Obama. Chadwick Boseman? Fred Armisen? Nick Cannon? Time will tell.
Obama, then an idealistic first-year Harvard Law student, took a summer job as an associate at Chicago law firm Sidley Austin where he fell for lawyer Michelle Robinson, his younger boss. Southside With You spans the day she agreed to go out with him when the two visited the Art Institute, took a long walk, and caught a showing of Spike Lee’s new film, Do The Right Thing. They were married in 1992.
“I took her to this new movie that everybody was talking about, directed by a guy that not that many people had heard of, but it was supposed to be pretty good,” Obama recalled during the film’s 25th anniversary celebration this summer. The site of the Obamas’ first kiss – curbside, outside a Baskin-Robbins in Chicago’s Hyde Park – was commemorated with a city plaque in 2012. [Deadline]
So far this sounds so god damned wholesome it’s borderline patronizing. Though I eagerly await Dinesh D’Souza‘s lengthy exposé about how Barack Obama’s disrespect for law and order was evident ever since his first date with his wife when they bonded over a film about a group of angry blacks destroying a small business owner’s livelihood.
Anyway, great idea, I guess. Weird idea. Meanwhile, I’m told Lars Von Trier is making a seven-hour porno about the first time Hitler and Eva discovered scat play.