I never went to a normal college, never lived in a proper dorm or experienced fraternity hazing or even rush week from an inside viewpoint. I went to an urban art school and then a commuter school. And though I grew up in a college town and later worked on the campus of another college I didn’t attend, I feel like I don’t have the proper perspective with which to judge most college movies and college kid characters as being true to life. This probably explains why I enjoy so many bad movies set in colleges and/or involving college students. I bet I could even check out a double feature of The House Bunny and College and have a good time at the movies.

Of course, I do have some semblance of good taste, and I also recognize that none of the following movies are anywhere near the quality of my favorite college movies (including Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers and the Frat Pack’s Old School), or even the beloved Animal House, which I regrettably find to be highly overrated (no, that doesn’t mean I dislike it or think it’s bad or unfunny). The ten movies on today’s list are merely guilty pleasures that I can’t stop appreciating no matter how hard I try or how old I get.

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It looks like Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Rubens–who admits to feeling “like I’m on my third or fourth comeback at least”–is making one more stab at a return to relevancy. Fresh off a guest spot on my favorite show, 30 Rock, he’s apparently lining up new projects under both his given name, as the man-child persona that made him famous.

This fall, Rubens is set to work with Todd Solondz, on the Happiness auteur’s first film in three years. And he’s apparently hoping to get a new Pee Wee movie off the ground as well. “I didn’t do everything I wanted as Pee-wee Herman,” he tells the AP. Rubens has completed two Pee-wee screenplays: a light-hearted road trip reuniting the old Playhouse crew (so, probably this, which IMDb Pro lists as “in production” at Paramount), and a dark satire said to explore ” how Pee-wee deals with Hollywood and the trappings of fame.”

I’m not sure contemporary audiences are exactly clamoring for that one, but the Solondz project sounds interesting. indieWIRE reported last Spring that Solondz had secured financing for a film described as “a kind of sequel to — or riff on — Happiness,” and though 2004’s Palindromes is regular IMDB’s most recent listing for the director, IMDB Pro says the project described by indieWIRE is now called Life During Wartime, and is still in the script phase. So: Pee-Wee+Solondz+Talking Heads reference. It’s not much to report, but it’s a potentially exciting combo.

I went to see Little Miss Sunshine over the weekend. For some reason I went in expecting to chuckle and smile, but not to belly laugh. I expected the film to be a bit over the top, a tad too gimmicky, and generally another Napoleon Dynamite wannabe (as I suggested in a recent post about formulaic films).

Going into a film with realistic-sized expectations always helps, but I think even if my expectations had been on steroids I would have been thoroughly pleased with Sunshine. Each character, while conceptually over the top (with the exception of the mom), was played perfectly. Similarly, even though many of the plot’s premises are over the top, they work. You don’t sit there thinking “That wouldn’t happen.” You sit there laughing like a fool.

So back to formulas. Obviously, some things really make a good story, a good film, and those things should be paid attention to and learned from. (It’s not like Sunshine is the first road trip film ever created, or the first with an overly angst-ridden teenager.) And even though legitimate formulas can be traced between successes like Sunshine and Napoleon, I still think the “anti-formula” has to be at the heart of a film like this if it’s going to make it. It has to be fresh. I think Sunshine perfectly balanced what works with what’s fresh.