"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.”  Everyone should’ve heard this line at some point by now. I was waiting for it the entire film; it was the final line of dialogue.
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Ranked number 12 on the American Film Institute’s list 0f 100 best American films in 1998, and coming in at 16th on the 2008 list, Sunset Boulevard continues to stand up as a cinematic classic.

The film opens up with a dead body floating face down in a swimming pool. This was recently given a nod in the first episode of season seven of Archer. ​

The film is narrated by Joe Gillis (William Holden), a struggling screenwriter whose ideas get rejected and his car is threatened by repossession. While running from the repo men, he stumbles upon a run-down mansion, the home of washed-up actress Norma Desmond, played brilliantly by Gloria Swanson. Once learning that he’s a writer, she coerces Joe to move into her home and assist with fixing her intended comeback film script (think Stephen King’s Misery without the hacking off of limbs with an axe).

In the 1980s, Paul Reubens brought us the character Pee-wee Herman. From the Tim Burton-directed Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to the Saturday morning hit Pee-wee’s Playhouse, he delighted us when we were younger. There were the colorful Playhouse characters: Chairry, Conky 2000, Jambi, Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis. We screamed when the secret word was spoken. We all wanted his bicycle. We remember the bar top dance to Tequila and are well aware that the Alamo has no basement (I’ve been there, it really doesn’t).

And then we got Big Top Pee-wee and the infamous adult theater arrest. Was Pee-wee Herman gone for good? Fast forward to 2010 when we saw the release of a new Pee-wee Herman Show, a stage version of the Playhouse show, and now in 2016, a new original film on Netflix, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday.

​“You have quite the imagination.” But sometimes, you can have a little too much.
 
First off, I praise the accomplishments of the crew of Escape from Tomorrow for using “guerilla” tactics to secretly film a motion picture at the Walt Disney parks. Reading on Wikipedia, cast members kept scripts on their phones and used simple equipment that tourists would record home movies on. I’m also glad a dark movie like this was filmed in black and white. Disney is quite the colorful place and it definitely would’ve had less of an effect.