Life

Wake it on up, people.

Un, deux, trois.....

Believe it or not, I am not a perfect human being.  I have my foibles.

I feel like I don't know anything these days.

I think I've been pretty clear on what my biggest flaw is.  I'm lazy. Well, when I'm at home and there's nothing I HAVE to do, I'm lazy.

After several weeks of limited movement, a handful of new releases prompted a pretty thorough shakeup of the Box Office Top 10. While Beauty and the Beast continued its unstoppable assault on the domestic box office, we also said hello this weekend to three new movies and goodbye to a handful of old favorites from the first few months of the year. Let’s start with the estimated numbers as of Sunday afternoon.

While Life may sometimes seem like a loving collaboration of used parts  —  a dash of Alien, a dollop of Gravity, a pinch of every ’90s monster movie your parents still have on VHS in their attic  —  there is one element of the movie that is Life and Life’s alone: that ending. If you haven’t seen the film yet, now would be a good time to stop reading, because we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of what made that Life ending work.

After a daring and dangerous rescue mission, the crew of the International Space Station recovers soil samples that contain the first incontrovertible proof of that alien life exists. They nurture the sample, a single living cell, until it grows into an adorable amorphous blob. The whole world is obsessed with their discovery. A little girl names it Calvin during a worldwide live broadcast from Times Square. The crew is smitten with their new passenger.

Here’s something I’ve never been able to fully understand about myself: I find haunted house movies terribly boring and haunted space station movies absolutely terrifying. Take your typical spooky movie  —  with old buildings, dark hallways, and moving shadows  —  and I could fall asleep right there in the theater. But kick that spooky movie up into space and give the characters some space suits? As far as I’m concerned, that makes anything an instant classic — and I’ve got the Event Horizon ticket stubs to prove it.

Any rock fan worth his or her salt is aware of the "live fast, die young" mythology surrounding the music -- and lord knows we've all seen more than enough musicians succumb to the stereotype. But a new study suggests the phenomenon might be far more widespread than previously believed.