This week is a busy week. We’re going to be live blogging from the Beaufort Film festival Friday and Saturday. You can read the blog over here at our editor’s blog. Should be fun.

But the result of missing a day to watch movies means we have to do everything in advance, which means lots of work, which means less time to play on this pop culture blog. Please, try not to be so disappointed. There will be time for our 3,324-word Lost post next week.

A quick American Idol thought: For us, this week, there were only two really obvious highlights from the boys and girls shows.

We get really excited when the contestants take songs we know and change them up and make something original. You know, it’s fun when they actually “create” something, instead of imitate or ripoff. We’ve said it before, we like this show, it’s fun, but we can’t imagine a scenario in which we’d actually BUY anything anyone on the show ever makes. However, we’re open to change.

These are the type of songs that hint that these singing mannequins might actually have a thread of artistic ability somewhere beneath their hair gel and teeth-whitening strips. We’d buy an album of rocked-out Lionel Ritchie covers. Who wouldn’t?

Gone Baby Gone; The Lost Room

Two PopPulse recommends, taken from the Guide, which appears every Friday and Saturday in the Gazette:

Just go Casey Affleck, go

"Gone Baby Gone" didn't break any box office records, and except for a Best Supporting Actress nod for Amy Ryan, it was overlooked at the Academy Awards, but if you haven't rented the Ben Affleck-directed crime noir drama, you should.



Adapted from a book by Dennis Lehane, the dude who wrote "Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone" is about a girl who gets kidnapped and the chaos that ensues. You want a better recap? Read the back of the DVD. The movie is good. That's all you need to know.

Affleck is a capable director and actor, and can bring out the best in his actors. He knows how to pace a scene and to make any palooka look good on
screen. The flick reeks of Boston - the new go-to favorite for directors looking to make gritty, urban crime dramas - and Affleck wisely cast real people in pivotal roles to get the movie and even more lived-in feel.

The problem with the movie, the only problem, is Casey Affleck - the star of the movie - who, we'll be honest, we just don't get. It's not that we hate him. We just don't think he is that great of an actor.



Is he bad in "Gone Baby Gone"? Eh. His character is richly written and perfectly drawn. It's the kind of role actors love, because it's all on the page. But baby Affleck, the actor, is just a mumbling blah. We had to watch "Gone Baby Gone" with subtitles on, and he was speaking English! He always seems bored on screen, like he either just woke up or never "exhaled." He’s like the best actor in the high school drama department. Come on, Casey! Let's hear some chatter out there!

And, OK, Ben isn't Olivier. We can count his great performances on one hand — "Chasing Amy," "Dazed & Confused," "Hollywoodland," "Good Will Hunting,"
"Chasing Lanes" — but at least he has charisma. He has a certain amount of charm. Casey is a mush mouth with a forgettable face.

So, yeah, there's that. "Gone Baby Gone" gets a solid A-. Find someone to digitally replace Affleck with Mark Wahlberg, and we might bump it up to an A.

The second best TV event with Lost in the title

So, we were talking to a coworker recently about this SciFi Channel miniseries we watched last month that was really sort of awesome. Although we didn't say "really sort of awesome," because we speak way more eloquently in person.



We tried to describe the plot of the movie, "The Lost Room," and as we did, we noticed his eyes glaze over and his face go blank and his mind went to a happy place it goes to when faced with boring people blathering endlessly about their kids or a dream or a TV show that thought was "really sort of awesome." We finally just said, "You just have to see it!" Then we exited hastily and cried in our cubicle.

So, yeah, try not to space out on us as we attempt to recommend "The Lost Room."

It's about this Pittsburgh detective, played by Peter Krause ("Six Feet Under"), who stumbles across this key. This key can be used on any door with a lock and takes you to this hotel room in the desert, once there, you can exit the same door and go anywhere in the world.

This hotel room once existed on our planet, but thanks to some cosmic event, it no longer does (It's a "lost room" - get it!). Instead, "objects" from this room - like the key - are spread all over the globe (although, oddly enough, mainly in Pittsburgh, which is apparently the center of the cosmos), and they all have special powers. The bus tickets zaps you to the desert, the glasses stop combustion engines, a glass eye heals whomever wears it - are you following this?



That's the starting point. The rest of the plot is about a missing girl and these warring factions of people call collectors who want the objects for various reasons. It sounds sort of stupid and boring - kind of like every episode of "Dr. Who" ever made - but it's really not. The story is clever and well-paced (up until the last five minutes), and even though it is six hours, there is so much more story to tell. It's rare that you see something on TV that is completely unique and fleshed out — smart science fiction — but "The Lost Room" is.

"The Lost Room" is available on DVD.