Why Michelle Obama descended Air Force One in shorts, white sneakers and hair undone
August 25, 2009
It wasn't Michelle Obama at all.
It was actually Meryl Streep playing Michelle Obama in the new movie "Michel and Michelle."
It's a breezy yet moody psychological thriller about how the ghost of Michel Foucault reads aloud, and in French, to Mrs. Obama from "The Birth of the Clinic," his 1963 tract on the history of the medical profession, hoping to inform health care reform in 21st century America.
Reports have circulated that the filmakers, who also borrowed liberally from Foucault's "Civilization and Madness" and "The History of Sexuality," were forced by studio executives to compromise their artistic vision in order to make it accessible to a multiplex audience.
The footage of Ms Streep descending Air Force One was actually part of the movie's penultimate scene, which was leaked on YouTube, according to sources who refused to be identified because they were not authorized to speak by Lynn Cheney, whose daughter was "not a lesbian" before the 2000 election but was having sex with women during that time.
Sources close to the production have disclosed that the film begins where "The Crying Game" left off. Ms Streep's character discovers that her husband really doesn't have the balls to take on the banking industry and that as a consequence the White House is facing foreclosure. The ghost, to which her husband is oblivious, persuasively makes the case that the health care reform he seeks is unpopular not because people are losing their minds but because people who have insurance are losing (or feel like they yet may lose) their homes.
In order to escape the French ghost which haunts her and to protect her family from the deadly apathy of her husband's economic team (which she finds in bed with the banking industry) she takes refuge in the only other home a First Lady knows: Air Force One.
Thinking she is safe up at 30,000 feet after Harrison Ford kills the French philosopher's ghost with venomous snakes he and Samuel Jackson find on board, she must still enlist the help of Jodie Foster and wisecracking flight attendant/TSB agent Mo'Nique to hermetically seal Sasha and Malia (both of whom are played by Dakota Fanning) in one of the aircraft's lavatories, away from an overbearing Ikram Goldberg who is fiendishly spoiling the girls with boxes upon boxes of delicious candy colored Crewcuts outfits.
After Ms Fanning drives Ikram mad by revealing that she is both Mile High Cyrus and her alter ego Hanna Colorado, she retaliates against her mother and forces her to dress like Ms Foster's travel "companion." Eventually she takes pity on her mother and allows her to remove the Mellisa Etheridge concert baseball cap, which has now irrevocably messed up Ms Streep's heretofore impeccably yet incomprehensibly appointed big hair.
The film reaches its climactic moment as Ms Streep forgives the girls and just as Air Force One lands at the Grand Canyon, where they all happily descend the aircraft, blithely unaware that the dreaded Ikram has not been vanquished!
In an astonishing denouement–or more likely a crass marketing setup for the sequel–the woman Sasha and Malia really drove mad was Sarah Jessica Parker, who had assembled an Ikram Goldberg disguise made out of the factory overruns from her "Bitten" collection (for the now defunct Steve and Barry's discount chain) and about which she is still telling anyone who will listen that they were categorically not made in sweatshops.
Mrs Cheney did authorize sources to reveal that Ms Parker will be played in the film by Sally Field, circa 1979.
