It’s no surprise why film remakes get immediately criticised upon their release. Understandably, many viewers are fed up of seeing their all-time favourites regurgitated for the frothing mouths of the next generation, while others are depressed by the drying up of Hollywood’s creative well. But remakes aren’t always a bad thing, which the following films show:

1. Ocean’s Eleven:  Steven Soderbergh
I’m not killing any sacred cows in saying that the original Ocean’s Eleven was a terrible film. It was mostly an excuse for the Rat Pack to hang out in Vegas, get rich, and call it a movie. But director Steven Soderbergh knocked that concept right on the head, crafting the ultimate heist film and fathering the redemption of George Clooney after the outright debacle that was Batman & Robin. Then the cast made Ocean’s Twelve, which was mostly an excuse for them to hang out in Europe, get rich and call it a sequel. Oh well.

2. The Thing:     John Carpenter
Back in 1982, Universal Pictures shocked audiences with a grotesque extraterrestrial lifeform, which completely eclipsed the original (The Thing from Another World) and built its own unforgiving world with elaborate special effects that remain as some of the most nauseating I’ve ever seen. Even 30 years later, it stands on its own two legs. Granted, they are growing out of its head.

3. The Hills Have Eyes: Alexandre Aja
The latest take on Wes Craven’s classic was a real nugget of the noughties. After seeing it, I swore that I’d never put myself in any situation where I could get stranded in the desert surrounded by sexually aggressive mutant cannibals. It seemed like such a mood killer.

4. The Departed:  Martin Scorsese
Based on the Japanese film Infernal Affairs, this film was brash and explosive where its predecessor was slick and understated. Whether throwing clouds of cocaine in the air with two prostitutes or idly playing around with a severed hand, Jack Nicholson was compulsively watchable in yet another classic from the gut-punching Martin Scorsese. 

These films are hardly arthouse favourites, but they are evidence that not all remakes are soulless ventures by money grabbing executives. It’s time for film fanatics to get over their fears, realise that the sky isn’t falling down, and recognise that if it does, someone will be along shortly to fix it up.

When I went to the cinema once over the holidays, one of my friends noticed a strange trend – every poster we passed could be dismissed as ‘remake/reboot’, ‘adaptation’ or ‘sequel’, with very few exceptions. John Carter from Mars, Conan, Jane Eyre, Green Lantern, Thor, X-men: First Class, Harry Potter – everywhere you looked, things that you’d seen before. This is not necessarily a bad thing in moderation, but over the last couple of years there has been a slightly disturbing trend for what is essentially unoriginal material. The reasons for this present themselves easily: in a recession, people are choosier about what they spend their money on, and in a world of quick DVD releases and easily downloadable online content the expensive and time-consuming ‘full cinema experience’ is a luxury that nobody is too worried about sacrificing. Still, people will always go to the cinema for something they really want to see, something that they think will be a uniting cultural event, or alternatively something that they just don’t want to get spoiled by friends or reviews. And what kind of film are punters excited by? Well, one that they already know.

This is over-simplified of course, but logically the more a person knows about a film then the more excited (or at least interested) they’ll be in going to see it. In a world with dozens of releases every couple of weeks, one film really has to stand out and assure the viewers that they’ll get value for their money. Certainly, a dedicated marketing campaign helps bridge this difficulty, but it’s far easier and less time-consuming to tap into these ‘existing audiences’. These adaptations, remakes and sequels are seemingly ‘less risky’ than an altogether new idea. A Hobbit fan who hates the idea of an adaptation would still want to go and see it, even if to only satisfy their curiosity.

It’s an exaggeration to say that all films coming out these days are unoriginal (Avatar, the highest-grossing film in cinematic history is an original concept), and of course just because a film is a remake or adaptation doesn’t mean it’s a bad film – just look at the critically praised Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is both a remake (of the BBC series) and an adaptation. To complain of ‘built-in’ audiences may also seem naive – people have always flocked to the latest release of their favourite star or director while knowing nothing about the film in question. Is this any different? Perhaps technically not, but I find this dearth of original content somewhat depressing. Spider-man was rebooted less than five years after the release of the last in the series, remaking films that did not warrant remaking – yes, the third was a little uneven, but overall the series was successful in presenting the mythos and character of the comic. This reboot lays bare the cynicism and greedy mentality of the studio system, stripping away any illusion that there was a motivation to make this film aside from profit. No matter how good the film is, or any other remakes for that matter, it is symbolic of the distasteful culture of profit over art that cheapens cinema.

The cover version is a notoriously fine art. It’s easy to play someone else’s song, but it’s very, very difficult to do it well – any artist trying to cover a song, especially something well-known, runs a very real risk of it sounding, as Pulp sang on 2002’s ‘Bad Cover Version’, ‘like a later Tom & Jerry when the two of them could talk… like an own-brand box of cornflakes’. The general consensus seems to be that making the song your own by changing it substantially is the key to a good cover, but this doesn’t always work. The world’s ears have been affronted by some truly awful covers over the years, but we won’t be too negative: here are fourteen pretty great ones. (Incidentally, we’ve edited this list down from a three-hour version for pretty much arbitrary reasons. Any shocking omissions? Add them to our collaborative Spotify playlist.)

The Slits – I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Where better to start than this? The Slits reclaim the soul classic (most famously performed by Marvin Gaye) by cheerfully ignoring the original gender dynamic and slapping funky, dub-steeped bass and scratchy post-punk guitars all over it, but best of all are the late Ari Up’s manic vocals.

Kokolo – Girls on Film

The Kokolo Afrobeat Orchestra are from New York, but do a very convincing impression of the jazz-funk-Yoruba style pioneered by Fela Kuti in the 1970s. Here they take the straight-outta-Birmingham original and make it sound as tropical as Duran Duran clearly always wanted to be. Best bit: the ebullient multilinguial chorus.

TV on the Radio – Heroes

David Bowie casts a long shadow over his songs and that makes it dangerous to take on virtually any, let alone the scorchingly brilliant ‘Heroes’. Staying true to the epic simplicity of the 1977 recording, TV on the Radio start off their version small and then build it up to a flickering splendour.

The Dead Weather – Are Friends Electric?

Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army must have sounded like the future in 1979, but the sawtooth synths of ‘Are Friends Electric?’ were coming across a little rusty by the time The Dead Weather included this cover on their debut single. It’s sort of appropriate, then, that the supergroup’s psychedelic blues-rock has backdated ‘Are Friends Electric?’ even further. When Numan sang ‘it’s cold outside, and the paint’s peeling off of my walls,’ he sounded like he was in a dystopian tower-block; Jack White makes it sound more like a shack in the Louisiana swamps.

The xx – Teardrops

‘Hey, have you heard of this really great new band?’ The xx crept onto everyone’s ‘cool new music’ playlists in early 2010, and can now be found in the usual haunts of underground bands made good(?): soundtracking Channel 4 comedies, Gossip Girl, and trips to Debenham’s. So it’s refreshing to hear something not included on their astonishing yet overplayed debut album, especially since this melancholy cover of Womack & Womack’s 1988 R&B floor-filler packs a weighty emotional punch alongside its intricate guitar work.

The Big Pink – Sweet Dreams

They shot to fame with the Nicki Minaj-sampled indie anthem ‘Dominoes’, but this cover of Beyoncé’s 2009 hit shows The Big Pink on the same introspective form as their early hit ‘Velvet’. Over eerie vocal samples, Robbie Furze takes naturally to Beyoncé’s lyrics and reveals them as some of the darkest in recent pop history. 

KASMs – Killer (Scentless)

Although they’ve been dormant since guitarist Rory Attwell’s departure last year to form his own project Warm Brains, KASMs were always set apart from their East London contemporaries by virtue of having a sense of humour about themselves. After all, you don’t get too many Shoreditch bands covering Seal (and it doesn’t even sound like they’re doing it ‘ironically’). The grinding guitars, string samples, and gasped vocals are all great, but while in Seal’s original ‘it’s the loneliness that’s the killer’, here it’s the bassline.

Grizzly Bear – He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)

Phil Spector was creepy a long time before he was imprisoned for murder in 2009: he oversaw the recording of The Crystals’ original version in 1962, which casts singer Little Eva’s experience of domestic abuse as a tender gesture. The song was (rightly) forced off the radio by public outcry. Grizzly Bear’s haunting and subtle 2007 version rewires the song as an internal drama, and the music’s rise and fall from barely-there to all-conquering, and back, suggests there’s far more to the story than the lyrics are letting on.

Fever Ray – Mercy Street

In which Karin Dreijer Andersson takes Peter Gabriel’s original and makes it sound like she wrote it. Fever Ray’s 2009 debut album was a sparse and spectral extension of the weird synthpop of Andersson’s band The Knife, and this single from last year (the first, apparently, in a series of different artists’ takes on Gabriel’s music) fits perfectly alongside tracks like ‘If I Had a Heart’. If you’re looking for another fix after this, check out her collaborative version of Nick Cave’s ‘Stranger than Kindness’, which is equally brilliant.

The Associates – Heart of Glass

This shimmering version of the Blondie classic lends the original a bitter, prickly resignation which the slightly saccharine original lacked, without sacrificing its dancefloor credentials. ‘I’m the one you’re using, please don’t push me aside’ never sounded so poignant, while the wordless female backing vocals seem to mock Billy Mackenzie’s pleading.

Chet Faker – No Diggity

From Melbourne and sporting an impressive ginger beard, Chet Faker’s sound falls in the same soul-meets-downtempo-electronica template as James Blake. While Faker’s own songs come highly recommended, this cover of Blackstreet’s mid-90s R&B anthem takes the original into drifting, dreaming bliss, and although he wisely avoids any attempts at Dr Dre’s rap verse, Faker is more than qualified to be ‘giving ‘em eargasms with my mellow accent’.

Easy Star All-Stars feat. Toots & The Maytals – Let Down

As Little Roy’s Nirvana covers album demonstrated this year, reggae version of alternative rock songs are an unlikely but fruitful source of original sounds. Perhaps it’s the fact that reggae is at heart an intensely melancholic genre, but Radiohead’s ‘Let Down’ translates perfectly into the new medium. Bringing in ska heavyweights the Maytals for this rendition was an inspired move by Easy Star All-Stars, who have so far released reggae versions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as Radiohead’s OK Computer.

Low – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

Morrissey’s lyrics for The Smiths have a reputation for being gloomy, but they always tended to cloak themselves in irony, melodrama, and details of the mundane. In this cover from 2001, Low strip all of that away and reveal the lyrics’ bleak potential for true despair, and Alan Sparhawk’s plaintive vocals sound truly desperate. A wonderfully depressing reinterpretation.

The Sundays – Wild Horses

The best cover version ever? Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer may be familiar with this one (the prom episode, remember?), but it remains starkly beautiful almost twenty years after its release. Totally ignoring the sickly, lilting blues bravado of the Rolling Stones’ original version, Harriet Wheeler’s lighter-than-air vocals turn it into a heartfelt story of abandonment and survival. Ten times better than the original.

Mixer: Cover Me is also available (in an abridged version) on Spotify – click here to load the playlist, and add your own favourite cover versions.

Every October, Frieze Art Fair graces Regent’s Park with its presence.

First launched in 2003, the fair features work from more than 150 of the world’s trendiest contemporary art galleries. No old masters to be found here: the Fair boasts work only by living artists.   

As well as providing the possibility to wander through Regent’s Park marvelling at contemporary creations, the Fair offers the opportunity to take part in an interactive programme of talks, conferences, film projects and events put on by artists themselves. This makes the art seem less intimidating, as the punters themselves can interact with the art. 

You can even get a makeover; but don’t expect it to make you look any younger. The project features the work of A Gentil Carioca, a Brazilian artist whose ‘makeover’ is designed to make you look older. Surprisingly, it seemed to have attracted great interest. All in the name of art. 

Highlights of the contemporary creations include the parody of Rodin’s Le Penseur, with a slightly bemused-looking goat sitting in the position of the thinker, and a strange sea-creature installation by Pierre Huyghe.  Ugo Rondinone created a chic flock of bronze birds pecking at an expanse of bright white, while a series of captivating black-and-white photos from Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu was also a piece not to be missed. 

Contemporary Italian artists Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni jostle alongside English, German and Chinese talents. Drawing dealers from around the world, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were at the Fair, auctioning pieces of astronomically-priced art including a piece by Lucian Freud. 

At nearly £30 for entry into the Fair (£20 for concessions), the price is aimed at chic London art types and dealers and could be prohibitive for the cash-strapped student. Nonetheless, the Fair is well worth a visit if you happen to be wandering past the park the next time Frieze makes its brief appearance in London. 

Scattered around Regent’s Park itself during the Fair are sculptures to admire, and this part of the Fair is free. Undoubtedly one of the most exciting parts of the Fair is seeing contemporary pieces of sculpture like Anish Kapoor’s metallic, spaceship-like discs coming into land in the open air of a crisp October afternoon, rather than viewing these sculptures in the more artificial atmosphere of a gallery.      

Another venture to look out for from the Frieze Art Project is the new Frieze Masters Fair, planned as a complement to the Project’s current offering of contemporary art. Frieze Masters will feature art from antiquity up to the turn of the last millennium. 

Cormac McCarthy wrote us the great post-nuclear apocalypse. The Road’s ironic hopelessness spreads dull pain, with the mysteriousness of an unknown illness, through the paper-thin incantations of secular faith: you have to keep going, you carry the light. McCarthy made atom bombs look utopian. It really was better to burn out than to fade away.

If The Road is the dying sigh of an old generation with only the bitter shadow of a hope, then The Orange Eats Creeps is one of its feral prodigy. Shortlisted for the Independent Bookseller’s Choice award, Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel has been held up as if it is some sort of light in the distance. ‘If a new literature is at hand, then it might well begin here,’ slathers Steve Erickson in the introduction. ‘Here is a book that insists on its glorious disarray, that finds in disorder a ravishing path to truth.’

Such praise is so exaggerated, it pretty much dooms the reader to be disappointed in the book itself. But more intriguingly, as I read, it started to seem like maybe this was all part of the game. The Orange Eats Creeps is a litany of teenage hyperbole. For the self-deceiving, self-aggrandising narrator, taboo-defying extremes are common, if clumsily forged, currency.

‘What would happen if you harnessed the sexual energy of hobo junkie teens? The world would explode and settle on the surface of another planet in a brown paste, is what. Cockroaches would lick it up and a new wave of narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads would hatch out of tiny pores on their backs.’

The whimsical, sado-masochistic fantasy of her narration, the particular attention she pays to each new obscenity, jars with the utter blankness of her world. It is a blankness that fits easily into the post-apocalyptic aesthetic. But the wasteland through which her gang slouches is – she sometimes hints – none other than the contemporary US, complete with ‘half-blown-out signs for supermarket chains in strip malls featuring exactly one nail place, one juice-slash-coffee place, and one freshmex-type grill chain restaurant.’

Krilanovich’s eschatology comes via George Romero: her vampires, her ‘blood-hungry teenagers’ are the mutant spawn of his consumerist zombies. Her post-apocalypse need not be set anywhere but in the real world. What  could be bleaker? The marxist theorist Evan Calder Williams writes of a ‘combined and uneven apocalypse.’ We can no longer expect the world to end in a bang. It ends like this, in a perpetual kaleidoscope of crisis, disaster, exploitation and resistance.

The Orange Eats Creeps throws its clichéd socio-sexual rebellion around exuberantly, but with an ambivalence central, I think, to the teenage experience. 

Krilanovich achieves a scalpel-cold parody of romantic nihilism, that matches McCarthy’s immolation of spirituality, ‘My jaw unhinged, my throat was thrown open and made to replicate exactly the form of a glass bottle with a rubber seal. Love poured inside. My heart got bigger and bigger until it threatened to explode.’

This is a novel about loss and yearning as much as it is about oblivious anarchy. Krilanovich does manage to add something to the vampire metaphor, by asking questions that we have all asked: what does it mean to be alive? Am I living yet? Is this it? Undeadness is an apt concept for people dispossessed and disappointed by life; and growing up can feel a lot like the end of the world.

American Psycho is not a comfortable read. As the protagonist and narrator, investment banker Patrick Bateman, horrifically tortures and murders seemingly at random throughout the book, it isn’t hard to see why Bret Easton Ellis’ third novel caused such outrage on its publication twenty years ago. But despite the unflinchingly graphic nature of American Psycho’s murder scenes, it would be a great disservice to label this book as torture porn. 

At the centre of the novel is Ellis’ chilling depiction of American society during the Wall Street boom of the late 80s: a world of designer labels, chic restaurants and top of the range hi-fi systems. For the cast of American Psycho a man is defined by what he owns, and Ellis leaves intentionally ambiguous the question of whether Bateman’s compulsion to precisely describe every aspect of his AV systems, his record collection, his colleagues’ outfits (just about anything that carries a price tag) is a result of some psycholgical need on his part, or has been forced upon him by the consumer-centric nature of his environment. 

This destructive obsession with material possessions and social status is at the heart of Patrick Bateman’s descent into madness, memorably stating that he has ‘not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.’

Bateman’s resulting alienation from the outside world is explored masterfully by Ellis without ever resorting to emotional pathos; a theme of mistaken identity runs throughout American Psycho as Bateman and his colleagues struggle to distinguish between any two people with a similar taste in Valentino suits, and the starkly clinical, unfeeling nature of the narrative is reflected in the awkwardly robotic interactions that take place between the characters. 

This all lends a curiously comical feeling to the book; Bateman’s narrative exists in a sort of exaggerated reality, a surrealist dream world where everything feels slightly out of proportion. 

The reliability of Bateman as a narrator is still a fiercely debated topic amongst critics, and it is tempting to say that many of the reported events are simply fantasy but, when faced with the entirety of Ellis’ disturbing vision, this point seems rather moot. Never does Ellis portray Bateman as external to his environment or wildly different from those around him; rather his grotesque murderous desires exist as a logical extrapolation of the grotesque selfishness of the society in which he is trapped. Perhaps this is the most pertinent, and lasting, message of this bold and terrifying cult classic.

The invention of the internet has brought books, maps and even our friends to the tips of our fingers. At the click of a button, encyclopaedias of information can be accessed, online shops browsed and now museums visited virtually. Yet with the juxtaposition of paintings by ancient masters and twenty first century technology, perhaps the Google Art Project has gone one step too far in its quest to bring the wealth of the world’s cultural prowess to our living rooms. Launched in February, the collaboration between some of the world’s most prestigious art museums and the internet giant Google allows everyone to become armchair curators, visiting museums and galleries across the world without moving and creating their own collections of their favourite works.

The project widens access to art to everyone. People who may not have the means or ability to travel in person to the world’s premier museums and collections can now see works from New York, Madrid and London in one place.

The danger, however, is that people will become complacent and neglect to visit museums on their doorstep, content to view the work online through the pixellation of a computer screen. They mayno longer feel the need to go and see the work in its original form, and the numbers of those frequenting museums could dwindle. With funding cuts already eroding resources given to  the  arts, galleries cannot afford to suffer any further losses.

While the Google Art Project allows you to zoom in and stare closely at the brushstrokes, the digitalised image is no substitute for the naked eye. The texture of the paint cannot be truly appreciated, and it is difficult to stand back and admire the work from a distance. Navigating virtually through the rooms of the museum is awkward. The atmosphere of reverence and awe inspired by seeing great art in its original form is lost by touring the museums virtually.

The architecture and layout of the physical museum often also contributes – deliberately or otherwise – to the way in which the paintings and sculptures are viewed. The industrial façade of the Tate Modern helps create the effect produced by the abstract paintings displayed within, while the National Gallery’s imposing columns fill one with a suitable sense of awe before any paintings have been viewed. The moment of standing in an empty room in the Courtauld Gallery, with Manet ‘s original Un bar aux Folies Bergère all to oneself is one that cannot be replicated online.

Nonetheless, admiring works of art online is surely better than not seeing them at all. For some it may serve as an introduction to great works of art, thereby increasing entrance to museums in the long run. If this does happen, maybe the Google Art Project should be viewed as a complement to museums, rather than their replacement.