Your involvement is simple. Just visit the This Is The End Facebook page and give them a LIKE. The more likes that they receive, the more crazy stuff you can see them do. For instance, if the page gets 500K likes, Danny McBride will wax Seth Rogen’s back (trust us, he’s overdue);  650K likes will force Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride to eat the same spaghetti noodle like a couple of lovesick dogs;  and for 800K likes Seth Rogen will paint a (hopefully tasteful) nude portrait of James Franco.

So, get to it. There’s hilarious male nudity out there just waiting for you! And remember to check back here as new videos are unlocked.

The film will be based on graphic novels of the beast which paint the MONSTER as endearingly human and vulnerable. So that’s where the similarities to Seth Rogen stop, apparently. Just kidding. JUST KIDDING. He’s likable in small-to-moderate doses.

Rogen will be teaming up with his writing partner Evan Goldberg and American Dad writer Matt McKenna, so…expect a comedy?

The story follows an epic weekend in the life of Seth Rogen and his movie star buddies. It all starts at a party at James Franco’s house but things quickly take a turn when the Apocalypse begins — devastating Los Angeles and Judd Apatow‘s A-list. Great, now he’s going to have to put his kids in evvverything.

Oh God, has anyone checked in on Rob Morrow yet?!!

Their calls to the other side have been heard. And rejected.

EW asked co-creator Judd Apatow about the likelihood of a movie, but it seems that he doesn’t want to go there.

“I love the question mark at the end of the series, so I never want to know more than that. It is the reason why you don’t want to find out what happened, like when they got off the bus in The Graduate.”

Paul Feig also crushes us, adding additional pressure onto the creators of Party Down.  ”I mean it could be great, but if it’s anything less than great, then it just waters down the memory of the rest of the show. For some reason that becomes the last thing you’ve done, and I always feel like if you don’t get it right it erases the memory of what came before it. But I don’t know. If we came up with a great idea, who knows?”

So, there is hope?! Thank God those kids haven’t grown out of their awkward phases yet!

Since 1984, the Spirit Awards have existed to reward actors and filmmakers that existed outside the world of big-budget Hollywood productions. 28 years ago, when the awards were first introduced, the rift between independent cinema and Hollywood fare was much larger than it was today, so the likelihood of any overlap between the Oscars and the Spirit Awards was almost unthinkable.

Today, a gap still exists, albeit a narrower one, thanks to increased access to independent films and the general mainstreaming and adoration of all things indie. So the night before the Oscars, the other Hollywood gets dolled up in their pixie dresses and blazers and sneakers to bestow some recognition on the filmmakers that are just too damn cool for the Oscars.

Yeah, they got Franco.

To give you an idea of how the Spirit Awards have gradually become more mainstreamed, this year’s host is Seth Rogen, a huge Hollywood star with enough of that slacker credibility to reassure everyone that, yes, they’re all very cool for being in attendance.

The Awards

The recognition given out by the Spirit Awards closely mirrors the Oscars in its prestige categories (Best Director, Best Feature, Supporting and Lead awards for Males and Females, etc). However, instilled with the spirit of independent cinema, the awards also showcase first-time directors, first-time screenwriters, as well as an award for the best feature made for under $500,000.

Of course, the Spirit Awards don’t have the huge backing or TV contract that the Academy Awards do, so despite being all “indie,” they bear names such as the Audi Someone to Watch Award, the Nokia Truer Than Fiction Award, and the Jameson Find Your Audience Award.

It's not an awards show unless you have a pregnant Natalie Portman in attendance, which is why the Oscars pay someone to knock her up every year.

One reason the sponsors are necessary is that, in addition to bragging rights, the aforementioned awards all come with grants that allow the filmmakers to keep doing their thing. So while having sponsors for independent cinema awards may seem a little counterintuitive, it’s done so that the recipients can keep staying independent and away from those godforsaken Hollywood studios.

 The Nominees

Again, you might see a little overlap here with the Oscars, as the Academy Awards are allowed to pick from all films, regardless of how they were produced or distributed, while the Spirit Awards stick with films made outside of major studios.

BEST FEATURE
50/50
Beginners
Drive
Take Shelter
The Artist
The Descendants

BEST DIRECTOR
Mike Mills, Beginners
Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive
Jeff Nichols, Take Shelter
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants

BEST FIRST FEATURE (Award given to the director and producer)
Another Earth
In the Family
Margin Call
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Natural Selection

JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD (Given to the best feature made for under $500,000)
Bellflower
Circumstance
Hello Lonesome
Pariah
The Dynamiter

BEST SCREENPLAY
Joseph Cedar, Footnote
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Tom McCarthy, Win Win
Mike Mills, Beginners
Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, The Descendants

BEST FIRST SCREENPLAY
Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth
J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
Patrick DeWitt, Terri
Phil Johnston, Cedar Rapids
Will Reiser, 50/50

BEST FEMALE LEAD
Lauren Ambrose, Think of Me
Rachel Harris, Natural Selection
Adepero Oduye, Pariah
Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

BEST MALE LEAD
Demian Bichir, A Better Life
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Ryan Gosling, Drive
Woody Harrelson, Rampart
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE
Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter
Anjelica Huston, 50/50
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Harmony Santana, Gun Hill Road
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

BEST SUPPORTING MALE
Albert Brooks, Drive
John Hawkes, Martha Marcy May Marlene
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
John C. Reilly, Cedar Rapids
Corey Stoll, Midnight in Paris

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Joel Hodge, Bellflower
Benjamin Kuh-Sulk, The Off Hours
Darius Kond-Jee, Midnight in Paris
Gui-omme Shiffman, The Artist
Jeffrey Waldron, The Dynamiter

BEST DOCUMENTARY
An African Election
Bill Cunningham New York
The Interrupters
The Redemption of General Butt Naked
We Were Here

BEST FOREIGN FILM
A Separation
Melancholia
Shame
The Kid With a Bike
Tyrannosaur

ROBERT ALTMAN AWARD (Given to one film’s director, casting director and its ensemble cast)
Margin Call

PIAGET PRODUCERS AWARD
Chad Burris, Mosquita y Mari
Sophia Lin, Take Shelter
Josh Mond, Martha Marcy May Marlene

ACURA SOMEONE TO WATCH AWARD
Simon Arthur, Silver Tongues
Mark Jackson, Without
Nicholas Ozek, Mamitas

AVEENO TRUER THAN FICTION AWARD
Heather Courtney, Where Soldiers Came From
Danfung Dennis, Hell and Back Again
Alma Har’El, Bombay Beach

The Broadcast

The awards aren’t too indie to be aired on TV, and the ceremony, usually held in Santa Monica, though for some reason held in a tent downtown last year) can be found live on IFC (duh).

Oh. The Spirit Awards often have figure skater Johnny Weir in attendance. Advantage: Spirit Awards

Like the Golden Globes, liquor is served during this show, giving it a peppier, more spontaneous feel. Futher, the Spirit Awards are a banquet-style ceremony, giving the affair a more casual feel than a seated theater awards show would have. Given the shoestring budget inherent with an indie awards show, the ceremony cuts out the superfluous sketches and prdocutions, just leaving hosts and awards. While this might sound a little dry, what it does is allow the people on stage (who are really the ones being celebrated) to spend a little more time entertaining the crowd, rather than moving through forced unfunny skits. Also, it caps the ceremony at two-and-a-half hours, which is about ninety minutes less than the Oscars.

So, if you just LOVE awards shows, but think the Oscars have become a self-important overblown mess (because it has), give the Spirit Awards a whirl. You may have a hard time getting your friend to fill out a Spirit Awards pool, but you’ll be able to sit through the event without getting bedsores, and you might even learn a little bit about film, which is something the Academy gave up on a long time ago.

Sounds like a tough sell in the humor department, but if done with enough heart, the results can be equally hilarious and moving. Here are five films that were bold enough to mix a little levity in with their heavy subject matter.

Funny People

This list doesn’t just prove that cancer can be approached in a humorous manner, it also proves that Seth Rogen might actually cause cancer. Perhaps he’s unknowingly radioactive like Dr. Manhattan, or maybe he’s poisoning soup with Pine Sol like that lady in The Sixth Sense. After appearing alongside a cancer-stricken Adam Sandler in Funny People and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50, it’s clear that Rogen could be to blame. Jonah Hill‘s sudden weight loss is starting to make a lot of sense.

My Life

When father-to-be Michael Keaton is diagnosed with terminal cancer of the kidneys, he decides to videotape himself giving life lessons to his unborn son. He records instructions on how to shave, play sports, use jumper cables, talk to girls, and cook spaghetti. Sadly by the time his son is old enough to appreciate these lessons, VHS is deemed outdated and they are impossible to view.

Aside from the casting news, Rogen has said he wants to paint a pretty “offensive” view of the apocalypse, with the only opportunity for celebrities to cameo in the film coming if they’re willing to play corpses of themselves.

Dead Steve Carell? I could get behind that.

Seth and Jay Vs. The Apocalypse begins filming in February, with Rogen and Evan Goldberg co-directing.

6 photosBryce Dallas Howard

50/50 opens in theaters on September 30th and also stars Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Phillip Baker Hall, and Angelica Houston.

Rogen will be a playing a character that has been referenced on the show before. A gentleman by the name of Dirty Randy. Dirty Randy is a friend of last season’s Raffi. Rogen’s character is a porno location scout and is known to clean up the locations after shooting is done.

Seth Rogen has made a name for himself by consistently playing a slacker man-child in most every role, so it would be nice to see him go over-the-top with the character of Dirty Randy, if only for the sake of variety. I mean, how conservatively do you want to play a character named Dirty Randy, anyway?

The plot is as follows:

Rogen plays a regular guy who lives near an alpha male fraternity house. Efron is a member of the fraternity, whose raucous behavior wreaks havoc on the other guy’s family life.

Of course, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg will serve as producers of the project, which was scripted by Andrew Cohen and Brendan O’Brien. It’s thought that Rogen will be making a cool $8 million for this project, which seems like an awful lot of money to act like yourself, but I’m just a writer.

It’s nice to see Efron bust out of the pretty-boy mold with both this and The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman. Maybe this hope for this guy yet.

Jamaica will draw from Will Reiser’s real-life experience of travelling to the island with his grandmother when he was 14. So there might not be as many weed jokes as one would think. But rest easy, stoners, as that probably means there will just be “a lot” as opposed to “a shit ton.”

The project is being fasttracked with Mandate, so unless there’s going to be some huge unforeseen effects here, this should hit theaters in relatively short order. Which is good, because I don’t know how much longer I can hold out without seeing a grandmother in a bathing suit.

7 photosZoe Kravitz

Imagine comes from the pen of screenwriter Dan Fogelman (Tangled), who’ll make his directing debut with this project. Fogelman is currently on fire, in the NBA Jam sense. He wrote July’s Crazy, Stupid, Love starring Steve Carell, who dropped out of Imagine due to scheduling conflicts. He also wrote the upcoming My Mother’s Curse starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen. (LA Times)

7 photosYvonne Strahovski

“Hanks will play the husband to the already cast Yvonne Strahovski, Rogen’ high school sweetheart in the pic to whom he once proposed to. Hanks and Strahovski let Rogen and Streisand crash in their house after the son and mother get caught in a blizzard.”

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m tired, so my eyes keeping crossing when I try to read that plot synopsis. I’m sure it’ll be just the kind of charming and likeable part to make Colin Hanks a household name. I’m pulling for you, Colin Hanks. (The Hollywood Reporter)

4 photos'Looper' Set Photos: Future Cars Don't Look Futurey Enough

Seth Rogen addresses Reiser at the top of the trailer as one of his “best friends.” But then he goes and co-stars as the goofy best friend. Is he imitating himself? Could be. Though at first I thought he was imitating the character Dan Fogler always plays.

Masks and avengers go together like the New York Knicks and sadness. As such, picking the nine greatest was no easy task. I can already hear the chorus of fanboys crying out in unison, “Why is The Hamburgler on your list? He’s not even avenging anything?” You don’t know his dark back story!

In honor of the May 3rd release on the Green Hornet on DVD, here are the 9 greatest masked avengers of all time.

Check out all the Sony “Action Unleashed” DVDs!

The Hamburgler

Mask? Check. Avenger? Double check. Captain America‘s new movie is actually called The First Avenger. You can’t get much more Avenge-y-er than that.

Darkwing Duck

Darkwing Duck spends is days as a mild-mannered suburbanite. But at night, he dons his mask and takes to the streets, avenging the crimes of F.O.W.L., and any other criminals who cross his path.

That’s a pretty impressive description for such a stupid cartoon. I should work in PR.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

With the help of their master/teacher Splinter, the Ninja Turtles fight the evil forces of Shredder and Krang. And despite the fact that they only use ninja melee weapons, they somehow manage to fight off entire armies of laser packing foot soldiers. Heroes in a half-shell, indeed.

Zorro

Zorro’s a lot like Batman. They both where masks. They’re both wealthy. And they both fight crime. But Zorro doesn’t feel the need to take on the persona of a filthy winged rodent. I guess the fact that his parents weren’t gunned down before his eyes was a game changer.

Orgazmo

Orgazmo definitely has a mask. But all and all, there’s not a lot of avenging going on until, at least until the end of the film when he finds out an evil director has kidnapped his fiancée. At that point, he busts out the Orgazmorator Ray and fights against the evil forces of Neutered Man. If this all sounds really stupid, it is. But that’s kind of the point.

The Lone Ranger

Cut from the same cloth as Zorro or Batman, The Lone Ranger travel the American Wes fighting crime with the help of his trusty horse Silver and his Indian friend Tonto. As it turns out, the Green Hornet is actually the nephew of The Lone Ranger, proving that masked avenging must run in the family.

Rorschach

Rorschach has the coolest mask on the list, given that it constantly changes its pattern. And when it comes to vengeance, Rorschach has you covered. In “The Watchmen” comic, the character handcuffs a child killer inside his burning home, leaving him with a hacksaw in case he wishes to cut off his arm and escape.

Batman

Was there ever any doubt that Batman would be number one on the list? He’s probably the most iconic masked avenger of all time. Seventy years after his inception, the character continues to rake in millions, if not billions, of dollars. Not bad for a guy who’s nothing but a glorified furry.

The nails-on-chalkboard-annoying actress/singer/person-who-needs-people teams with Seth Rogen for My Mother’s Curse, a road trip movie that I anticipate will make me long for such masterpieces as College Road Trip. Paramount just gave Curse an official release date of March 30th, 2012. You’ve been warned.

Curse was written by Dan Fogelman (Cars), who wrote the only Pixar movie a lot of people (who need people) dislike. Anne Fletcher (The Proposal, 27 Dresses) directing does not inspire confidence. (Hollywood Reporter)

CAST: Simon Pegg; Nick Frost; Seth Rogen; Jason Bateman; Kristen Wiig; Sigourney Weaver

SYNOPSIS: Two British comic-book geeks traveling across the U.S. encounter an alien outside Area 51.

However, in these clips, I can see the elements working together nicely. Comic-Con, secret government alien (?) weed, girl-on-robot sex: these are the topics that all movies should discuss. Plus director Greg Mottola shot Superbad, which I continue to McLovin, despite how dated that reference has already become.

Paul will beam you into theaters March 18. (JoBlo)

In the film, Rogen is an inventor who tries to sell a new product on a road trip with Momma Streisand, and along the way she’s reunited with an old flame. Hopefully, Rogen’s invention is the bubble from “The Prisoner,” which traps Streisand inside it for most of the movie. Then Rogen teams up with Harold & Kumar and we have a proper road trip. One with boobs, weed, more weed and more boobs.

My Mother’s Curse will be directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal – ugh) and written by Dan Fogelman (Fred Claus – double ugh). Yeah, this long shelved project was finally greenlit, and Paramount’s passing the curse onto moviegoers. I could plotz. (Hollywood Reporter)

“Look out everybody – I’m a kung fu master who’s still clumsy like a fat guy.”

This is what your next ass beating’s gonna look like.

“2011 no taste too good…”

The excerpt from a Rogen piece in the Toronto Sun lays it out nicely:

“George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it. He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, ’My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry… I first thought he (Lucas) was joking… and then I totally realized he was serious and then I started thinking, ’If you’re George Lucas and you actually think the world is gonna end in a year, there’s no way you haven’t built a spaceship for yourself… So I asked him… ’Can I have a seat on it?’ He claimed he didn’t have a spaceship, but there’s no doubt there’s a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go… It’s gonna be him and Steven Spielberg and I’ll be blown up like the rest of us.”

So Lucas has known about the end of days for a while and his swan song to us is going to be Star Wars: The Clone Wars? Sounds like some shoddy planning, Lucas. If he is so sure the world is going to end, why is he only telling people like Seth Rogen? Does Jonah Hill know about this? Surel Paul Rudd won’t perish with the rest of us. In my mind, George Lucas is taking the next year or so to go around and warn all of the actors in the Judd Apatow universe that the end is nigh. Which begs the question: What has to take place for us to get footage of Lucas giving this serious talk to a befuddled, yet polite Michael Cera?

Director: Jennifer Yuh

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Gary Oldman, Seth Rogen, David Cross, Jack Black

Synopsis: Po joins forces with a group of new kung-fu masters to take on an old enemy with a deadly ne weapon.

Release Date: May 27, 2011

In other news, The Green Hornet’s next nemesis might be Vince Vaughn, whose Ron Howard-directed romantic comedy The Dilemma had to settle for second-best, making $17.4 million, which you math wizards already know is about half the weekend gross of The Green Hornet.

In the “exciting” world of limited release, the only shining light in Paul Giamatti in Barney’s Version (for which he won a Golden Globe last night), which made $17,925 per screen on four screens. Four screens! It’s like when an election is really close and you wonder if maybe the results would have been different if you’d voted. (The AV Club)

”Seth was as important, if not more important than the studio. So I felt, ‘well, it’s not really my movie.’ I accepted that. But I realized there was still tons I could infiltrate or infuse my personality through discussion all the time.”

This confirms my suspicion that Seth Rogen is our generation’s David O. Selznick. Rogen isn’t denying the creative clash between himself and Gondry, though. Here he is on the scene in the movie featuring Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”:

“I remember when we were shooting it, [Gondry] was sitting there with his arms crossed and a grumpy look on his face but there wasn’t a second when we thought we might be wrong. We were like, ‘You are going to feel so stupid when you see that this is the funniest [EXPLETIVE DELETED] thing in the entire world.”

How many more creative partnerships are going to dissolve before Coolio is stopped!? (IndieWire)

Rogen and Goldberg gave insights into the plot of Sausage Party, their foray into hard R-rated animation.

“It’s a movie about sausages in a supermarket that need to get back to their aisle before the fourth of July,” says Rogen.

Goldberg adds, “Their whole goal is to get purchased. And they get lost and they need to get back to their aisle before the Fourth of July starts.”

Despite having Monsters Vs. Aliens and Shrek Forever After director Conrad Vernon and Kung Fu Panda director Mark Osborne involved, they’re having trouble getting the project off the ground. The problem they’re encountering is the same one that David Fincher is having with The Goon. There’s just not a strong enough audience for non G-rated animated films. That, and Jonah Hill has already blown through the production budget “researching” different sausages. Yeah right, Jonah. “Research.” (via Screenrant and CinemaBlend)

First up is The Green Hornet. The film stars Seth Rogen and comes to theaters January 14th. It’s– OMG THAT CAR IS COMING AT ME IN 3D SO I BETTER DUUUUUUUCK!

Second is the broodtastic new French poster for Marvel’s Thor, to be released May 2011. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, the film stars Chris Hemsworth as the hammer holding hero. In this poster, Thor has just read Albert Camus’ The Stranger and is developing his own thoughts on existentialism:

(Film School Rejects)

The Green Hornet is as good as any Green Hornet movie could probably be, which is to say he’s not a very interesting superhero. He owns a newspaper and his sidekick is a martial artist? That leaves a lot more room for Seth Rogen to play than maybe a character with more definition, but the superhero blockbuster as an art film doesn’t really work.

It’s actually when Britt Reid (Rogen) become The Green Hornet that the movie falls apart. Before that, the story of an antisocial rich kid has an edgy attitude, even if it only manifests in a PG-13 drunken party. Finding out his dad (Tom Wilkinson) died on the news in his limo is effectively dramatic. Christoph Waltz looks great as Chudnofsky with a goatee, a Caesar cut and a double barreled gun.

Reid becomes a total dufus, doing happy dances to celebrate victories. He never shuts up during an action scene and often just states what’s happening to him. Reid’s interview with Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz) is just weird, perhaps an uncomfortable bit of failed improv, and he’s always babbling at her. The Spy Kids were more mature.

I get the attempt to deconstruct the hero/sidekick relationship but it’s really forced. Reid would be insecure that Kato (Jay Chou) is such a badass, but he’s just whiny about it. Kato’s issues with being a servant as his cover are better played but still come out of nowhere. Reid’s analysis of superhero movies is pure Rogen. He’s wrong about all movie heroes being good guys though. Spider-Man and Batman always have trouble with PR.

By the time Kato and Reid are reall fighting, it becomes cartoon slapstick with bouncy sound effects. The gas gun bit is funny, but then Reid is still going totally gaga over Lenore like she’s the only one who can save his newspaper. This is a secretary with little journalism experience. There is plenty of people way more qualified for the job, and I bet some of them are also hot too.

The action is pretty awesome. If they’d have just done a straight generic plot with these action scenes they would have had a solid movie. Kato-vision basically alters perspective, time and physics at the same time. The climax in The Daily Sentinel is thrilling. Then there’s more silly comedy epilogue.

The 3-D looks fine. There are some good shots of the Reid mansion and roses coming into focus, plus more abstract Michel Gondry shots towards the end. There’s also a lot of blurry background from the post conversion process. Anything CGI, like flying bottle caps or missiles, can come out of the screen pretty easily.

Ultimately The Green Hornet is as troubled as its many delays would indicate. You know, superhero comedy is tricky. They can’t all be Blankman.