[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published May 23, 2011.] A few weeks back, we mentioned that list of Steven Soderbergh’s “cultural diet” (films viewed and books read and TV watched over the course of one year), noting that, in one week, he took in Raiders of the Lost Ark no less than three times — and that he carefully pointed out that each viewing was in black and white. In writing about that list, I said that this was something “we’re totally going to do now,” and last week, I did. Guess what? Soderbergh’s right. Raiders is way better in black and white.

That little experiment got me thinking about other modern movies that might play better in this decidedly less-than-modern format. There is, we can all agree, just something about black and white. In his wonderful 1989 essay “Why I Love Black and White,” Roger Ebert wrote: “There are basic aesthetic issues here. Colors have emotional resonance for us… Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.”

Once I picked the movies that we thought would work for this experiment, I realized that trying to just describe them in a standard post wouldn’t work at all. So I’m doing something different with this post: I made a little video for each title, with clips transformed to black and white and commentary explaining why each one was selected. Check out Raiders and my other choices after the jump.

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1. A new Amy Winehouse album which is being together producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Rem will be hitting shelves on December 5; called Amy Winehouse Lioness: Hidden Treasures, it features unfinished tracks as well as alternative versions of previously released material. [via NME]

2. DreamWorks’ Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots — which is currently at an 81% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes — topped the weekend box office, bringing in $34 million; the animated film also set a new record for the best Halloween weekend debut of all-time, so expect plenty more where that came from. [via USA Today]

3. Robert De Niro and John Travolta will be sharing the screen for the first time in Killing Season, an action flick set in the Appalachian Mountains that tells the story of an American military veteran going to head-to-head with a former Serbian soldier. [via Deadline]

4. The Coen Brothers have offered Justin Timberlake the role of a folk singer named Jim in their new movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, which is set in the ’60s music scene in Greenwich Village. He would be playing the husband of Carey Mulligan‘s character, Jean. [via Slashfilm]

5. Twenty-five years later, a reboot of the sketch show In Living Color is in the works for next year, with Keenen Ivory Wayans serving as the executive producer and host. [via Vulture]

Bonus Buzz: The Top 23 Halloween Costumes Of Reddit

So far, Occupy Wall Street has been getting all the celebrity visits. (You heard, didn’t you, that Russell Brand and his wife, what’s-her-name, visited Zuccotti Park with Russell Simmons over the weekend?) But did you know that, over a week ago, the guy who inspired The Dude from The Big Lebowski made a trip to Occupy Los Angeles over a week ago? As Slate reports, Jeff Dowd seemed to be enjoying himself there, and had a lot to say about America’s shift from a “production-based” to a “financially based” economy. He also found time to praise the late Steve Jobs, because “what the guy stood for was making things.” (Never mind that many of these things ended up being made in China.) Watch the dude preach for a solid 11 minutes after the jump.

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1. One-time recluse Jeff Mangum stopped by Wall Street last night to play a surprise, eight-song acoustic set for the protestors camped out there. Watch a video of his performance here.

2. According to bookies in the UK, Bob Dylan is now the frontrunner to receive this year’s Nobel prize for literature, with 5/1 odds. The pool of contenders also includes less wild card options, like Syrian poet Adonis (6/1), Haruki Murakami (8/1), Tomas Transtromer (10/1), and Thomas Pynchon (20/1). [via Guardian]

3. The Coen Brothers are working with Cedar Rapids writer Phil Johnston on a new TV comedy for Fox. The hour-long show, which they’ll executive produce, will be about “a bad-tempered private eye in Hollywood.” Could be promising? [via The Playlist]

4. Thanks to her burgeoning film career, a rumor is circulating that this could be Kristen Wiig’s final season on Saturday Night Live. While we love Wiig, we actually think that her departure could be just the shakeup that the show needs to get out its current rut. [via Showbiz 411]

5. Super hilarious New Yorker regular David Rakoff has won this year’s Thurber Prize for American Humor. If you haven’t read Half Empty, his most recent book of essays, pick up a copy stat. [via The Awl]

Bonus Buzz: The 13 Best Tweets From #OccupySesameStreet

Musicians have long had a place in films, whether rock stars, jazz sidemen, or tormented composers. What follows is a selection of memorable ones taken from ten films. They range from drug-addicted cult favorites to ambitious hip-hop stars, from showtune composers to sidemen now living in small-town obscurity. What they share is a certain quality: a lingering sense that, if these characters were real, we’d want to seek out more of their music. Sometimes that’s accomplished through a deft performance, and sometimes via a writer or director who brings an insider’s knowledge of a particular style of music. In all cases, there’s something utterly compelling, and something that endures past the last frames of film.

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It seems like ages ago (although it was only earlier this summer) that we learned the Coen Brothers were making a movie about New York City’s 1960s folk-music scene partially based on Dave Van Ronk‘s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Since then, we’ve been waiting for some more details — and now we’ve got them. Well, we have a few. The film will be scripted by the Coens, called Inside Llewyn Davis, and Slashfilm speculates that the title character will be a fictionalized version of the late Van Ronk (pictured). Set in Greenwich Village (where else?), the movie’s soundtrack will be live music. This is all very good news, but as die-hard Coen fans, we have to ask: Couldn’t you have given us a release date, too? Even, like, a ballpark one?

“Over the line!” “Obviously you’re not a golfer.” “That rug really tied the room together.” “I am the walrus.” “Nobody fucks with the Jesus.” “Don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey.” Really, we could go on all day here. As card-carrying Little Lebowski Urban Achievers, we managed to get in to The Big Lebowski cast reunion and screening last night at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom. Also present? Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, and the film’s music director, T Bone Burnett. The event was part of this year’s annual Lebowski Fest, as well as a celebration for the film’s brand-new Blu-Ray edition. For all you super-fans who didn’t have the chance to down some Caucasians with the Dude last night, here’s a video recap and some of our favorite moments.

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On August 28, 2003, a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells walked into the PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania with a bomb strapped to his chest. It was placed there by a pair of criminals who told Welles that if he did not acquire $250,000 from the bank, the bomb would detonate. Forty minutes later, Welles was apprehended by police; he frantically explained his predicament and begged the officers on scene for help. Twenty minutes later, the device exploded, blowing a softball-sized hole into Welles’s chest that killed him.

Hilarious, eh?

The writers of 30 Minutes or Less (which hits theaters tomorrow) apparently thought so, since they took the broad strokes of Wells’s strange story and turned it, improbably enough, into an ‘80s-style chase-heavy buddy summer action comedy. Sure, the names have been changed, as have a few of the details—for example, though 30 Minutes protagonist Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is an ignorant victim, a subsequent investigation in the real case revealed that Wells was involved in the planning of the scheme, though he thought the bomb would be a phony (family members maintain his innocence). And—spoiler alert—they obviously changed the ending, since a softball-sized hole in Jesse Eisenberg is not exactly the cheeriest capper for your summer laugh riot. But the similarities between 30 Minutes and the Wells case, particularly in the details of the motive for the crime, are extensive (Movieline’s Jen Yamato provides a comprehensive rundown); nonetheless, Sony reps insist that though the writers were “vaguely familiar with what had occurred,” (vaguely!) “neither the filmmakers nor the stars of 30 Minutes or Less were aware of this crime prior to their involvement in the film.” Riiiight. Ain’t coincidences crazy?

Whatever the outcome of the controversy, and however you feel about 30 Minutes trying to spin a dead pizza guy into comic gold, it certainly doesn’t mark the first time that Hollywood has taken certain, shall we say, creative liberties with real life. We could fill the entirety of Flavorwire with instances of historical inaccuracies in the cinema; in the interest of brevity, we’ve instead selected ten particularly noteworthy cases of films that egregiously blurred the line between fact and fiction.

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1. We were happy to see that Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s hilarious musical The Book of Mormon killed it at the Tonys last night, taking home nine awards, but our favorite part of the night had to be host Neil Patrick Harris’ opening number. Watch it here.

2. JJ Abrams’ mysterious monster movie Super 8 dominated the box office in its opening weekend, making $37 million — which, while not exactly chump change, has to be a lot less than what they were hoping for. X-Men: First Class came in second, earning $25 million, while The Hangover Part II rounded out the top three with $18.5 million (bringing its cumulative earnings to a whopping $216.5 million). [via Vulture]

3. Famed E Street Band saxophonist Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons — who most recently performed on two songs on Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album — suffered a stroke on Sunday. Unfortunately, there’s no word yet on how severe it was. [via Rolling Stone]

4. This could be interesting: The Coen Brothers told a crowd at the opening of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s new facility, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, that they’re working on a project that will have quite a bit of live music in it, comparing it to Noah Baumbach’s 2007 film Margot At The Wedding. [via indieWIRE]

5. If you didn’t watch Lil Wayne’s highly anticipated MTV Unplugged performance then you missed many magical moments, most notably seeing him cover Tupac’s “Hail Mary” and the premiere of Tha Carter IV track “Nightmares of the Bottom.” Check out the full episode here.

Bonus interactive infographic: A History of Modern Music

The Coen Brothers’ Christmas remake of True Grit hits DVD and Blu-ray today (finally), flush off the success off 10 Oscar nominations and a domestic box office haul of over $170 million (making it, by a long shot, the Coens biggest hit to date). Its runaway success and high quality gave us pause, since we spend quite a bit of time deriding the overload of remakes in the moviemaking business today — yet another example (along with the endless stream of sequels, TV show adaptations, and even board game movies) of nervous suits who are only comfortable giving the green light to the familiar. But every once in a while, a remake comes along that not only matches its predecessor, but tops it. After the jump, check out our list of ten remakes that were better than the original.

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