First, a disclaimer: I am flying high on prescribed Vicoprofen at the moment due to having my wisdom teeth out this morning. In dental news, my teeth came out easily and all I had was Novacaine. People keep telling me this is weird, that I should have been knocked out for it, but really, it took minutes to have all four removed. My dentist was awesome. Before the first needle I said, “For the record, I’m a huge wuss and I’ve never had a cavity so I’ve never had any dental work before. Just manhandle me however you need to and I’ll survive.” She proceeded to do so in a way that never hurt, never made me uncomfortable, and the vast majority of the time I had a mix of Kylie Minogue, The Automatic and Darkest of the Hillside Thickets blaring away in my headphones. Yes, that is a weird combination but it totally worked.

Now, movies! Specifically, The Apple and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I went to see the disco/pop musical The Apple at the Carolina Theatre of Durham on Tuesday night. Let me tell you this: it is high-larious. I was at the late show on a week night so there were maybe a dozen other people in the theatre. Collectively, a baker’s dozen of us laughed harder at that movie than I’ve seen full theatres laugh at intended comedies. Hell, I went to see Some Like It Hot at the Carolina a week or two before that and a half-full theatre laughed less at that very funny film than ten or fifteen of us did at The Apple.

In short, it’s a ham-fisted allegory of the story of Adam & Eve in which at least two thirds of the cast wear head-to-toe silver lamé. Made in 1980, it attempts to predict a very campy, futuristic vision of 1994, when the world is ruled - ruled! - by a music label. The story is of two earnest young Canadian performers (no, really) who are tempted to sign with this all-powerful music label.

What’s completely insane is how much of it is actually pretty good and yet the whole is such a complete trainwreck. The songs aren’t all terrible! There’s some pretty decent choreography. The politics of the movie are spot-on. It’s a film that (senselessly ignorant of its own rightness) manages to predict some measure of the ways labels would try to control consumers’ experience of music. For that matter, it includes the actor who plays Professor Sprout in her first film role.

So what goes wrong? Everything else. The villain’s headquarters look like the chemistry building from a run-down college. Villains drive Jetson-pimped stationwagons and the hoi-polloi drive AMC Gremlins with bubble-domes on top. In every crowd shot - every single crowd shot - there’s at least one woman pushing a triangular, wheeled cart that’s either a stroller, a hot-dog stand or both. It is a train wreck of bad acting, cheap sets, cheap costumes and unintended humor. It’s a movie that’s trying to be campy; what’s weird is that whenever it tries to be campy it fails and when it tries to be serious it’s campy.

It is extremely highly recommended. I am dead serious.

In other news, I went to see Indiana Jones last night and really, really liked it. It’s no War and Peace but it hits all the right notes, it has a single action sequence that lasts at least ten minutes, Harrison Ford very obviously has a ball and Shia LeBeouf manages not to ruin it. In fact, he basically spends the entire movie taking the piss in amusing ways. I realize that I’m on painkillers as I say this but he was… fun to watch (mostly) in this movie. I would not necessarily reject a film outright based on his inclusion in it after this. I must also be honest enough to say that most of my sheer hatred of him comes from Transformers, which is an unconscionably terrible movie in every possible respect and trying to smear him with that project might not be entirely fair.

At any rate, um… yeah. Vicoprofen: the tangent-maker. You have no idea how long it took to type this up.