| Culturebox Canadian Sellout Anxiety Why so many from up north come south—and then feel guilty about it. By Michelle Orange
Posted Friday, Jun 14, 2013, at 02:06 PM ET  It's apocalypse season again, those fun few summer months when instead of wearing white the Hollywood movies are clad in artfully tattered rags. This June alone, in addition to Will and Jaden Smith's After Earth, we have Brad Pitt leading us through the CGI carnage of World War Z and the maestro of world-ending mayhem himself, Roland Emmerich—director of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012—burning the White House Down. Wedged between these more traditional entries is This Is the End, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's terrifically silly genre-buster, in which a party at James Franco's Los Angeles mansion goes nuclear—or Satanic, or maybe alien: One of the running jokes questions which flavor of apocalypse has interrupted the fun. The movie sends up any number of the end-of-the-world staples audiences can now measure in buttered handfuls. Rogen and Goldberg say their film, the directorial debut for both, is really about friendship. The same is more obviously true of their first feature collaboration, Superbad, which they wrote as kids growing up in Vancouver. But whereas Superbad X-rayed an adolescent male friendship, This Is the End—despite featuring a cast so pungently male that the lone woman (Emma Watson) to stumble into the story soon axes her disgusted way out—offers a less gendered slant on its theme. The niche it explores instead is even more exclusive: What happens when a Canadian friendship is hitched to a third wheel the size and shape of ... To continue reading, click here.
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