I’m working on a Knocked Up response piece as I speak, but it needs to be acknowledged that Seth Rogen is a star. He’s witty and affable with a cool-sounding gravelly voice, he’s a brilliant writer, and he projects an agreeable bullshit-free, smart-stoner persona that goes over gangbusters with men and fairly well with women because they find him puppy-dog cute. He’s pretty much the new John Belushi — just as wily and overfed, but a little more easy-going and a little less manic and over-the-top. But definitely a guy’s guy and funny as hell.

I’m especially keen to see Rogen in The Pineapple Express, a David Gordon Green movie that’s now shooting, from a script by Rogen and Evan Goldberg. It’s about a couple of stoners who get mixed up with a malevolent drug gang, and with Green calling the shots you have to figure it’ll be a bit more dramatic than funny, or certainly a mixture of the two.

But my God, Rogen needs to tighten up and lay off the cheeseburgers and the cheese fajitas. He’s only 25 and he looks 35, easily. (Apatow shares this exact observation via some girl dialogue in Knocked Up.) Rogen doesn’t have to turn himself into Orlando Bloom, but if you’re this roly-poly at age 25 you’re heading for trouble. The way Rogen’s going he’ll be a super-moose by the time he’s 30 and will almost certainly be coping with health issues ten years later. Does he want to be Chris Farley or John Candy?

I’ll always have a black spot in my heart for the first half of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, but no more bashing Apatow — he’s done pretty well with this film and deserves respect. Knocked Up stil has that basic believability problem that I mentioned a few weeks ago, and it ignores money issues like the plague, but Apatow has made a 132-minute comedy that just breezes right along and feels like 100 minutes or less. It’s an entirely decent, good-hearted, sometimes very funny movie.

My Blackberry e-mail and web access wasn’t working last night after I came out of a screening of Judd Apatow‘s Knocked Up, and now I know why.

Variety‘s Allison James has finally run a Cannes 2007 advance-buzz piece, and her big lead-graph prediction is that Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights will play the opening-night slot. That’s it? Everyone’s been saying that, and the Cineuropa guys predicted that one over two weeks ago.

If Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men doesn’t play at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, and thus deny Coen-heads the first peek at Javier Bardem’s performance as Chigurh, the ogre-ish hit man, a lot of people will be bitterly disappointed.

The official Cannes festival lineup will be released sometime tomorrow morning in Paris (i.e., Thursday), which will be an hour or two after midnight in Los Angeles tonight. If anyone in the loop wants to shoot me an early blast…

Hollywood Elsewhere is fully expecting to hear that the following English- language titles are in: Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men and Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart (i.e., his Daniel Pearl movie). I’m also nurturing this out-of-nowhere notion that Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private will be shown. A lot of us would also like to see Michael Moore‘s Sicko and Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dreams.

I’m giving fair warning right now there will be dismay and disappointment if most of the films in the previous graph aren’t announced. I want the Coen, Haynes and Anderson films to show up, at the very least.

Yesterday’s Cineuropa column says that U.S. films which have apparently secured a competition slot include Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park (old news), David Fincher‘s Zodiac (possibly being rescued from the dreaded closing-night berth?) and James Gray‘s We Own the Night, which costars Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix.

James is reporting that Persepolis, a graphic novel-styled animated feature that was press-luncheoned last year by Sony Classics, is getting a berth of some kind, and that Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face may be chosen in the Director’s Fortnight section.

Other promising possibles, she’s suggesting, are Hector Babenco‘s El Pasado, Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light (another early Cineuropa pick), Bela Tarr’s L’homme de Londres and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

A friend claims that the Cineuropa speculators are to be regarded askance. They “emphatically stated that Coppola’s film [i.e., Youth Without Youth] was going, though that’s impossible,” he cautions.