Well this is a bummer. Carriers wasn’t even on my radar until Paramount Vantage put out a chain of intense trailers showing a world ravaged by viral pandemic. Now, according to Fangoria, I’m not even going to have the opportunity to see Chris Pine and Piper Perabo wear cute surgical masks while they try to survive the end of times. You can’t go from “What’s Carriers?” to “Man, I can’t wait to see Carriers!” to “What do you mean I can’t see Carriers?”. That’s just mean, Paramount Vantage.

But if you live in one of the following cities that isn’t Austin, TX, September 4th should be a good day to wear a surgical mask of your own to the theater and freak out everyone sitting next to you:

After those earlier budgetary snafus, it seems that Tony Scott’s Unstoppable is now hurtling inexorably towards its start date, like a shinkanzen with no brakes.

Two more actors have joined the cast of the runaway train movie, with Jessy Schram and the under-rated Kevin Dunn bolstering the big-name trio already on board. That would be Denzel Washington, Chris Pine and Rosario Dawson, in case you didn’t know.

Washington and Pine will play an engineer and conductor, respectively, who must band together to stop their train, laden with toxic chemicals, from crashing into a nearby city. That would be Bad.

Dawson signed on this week to play a train dispatcher, a la Washington in The Taking Of Pelham 123, who helps the boys out via radio. Dunn, who was one of the few moving parts it was enjoyable to watch in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, will play Dawson’s boss. Schram will play Pine’s estranged wife.

Mark Bomback wrote the script for a movie that seems so gloriously uncomplicated that it might have made do with an instruction manual. But it’s Tony’n’Denzel, and so this is high on our must-see list.

Filming on the Fox thriller will start this autumn in Pittsburgh.

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Courtesy of IconvsIcon.com for the interview with actor Reggie Bannister, which as it turns out has his own hand in Chris’s upcoming film “Small Town Saturday Night”.

You can read what Reggie had to say about Chris below.

What can fans your fans catch you in next?
There’s another “mainstream” picture that we shot up here where I live, up in the mountains, called ‘Small Town Saturday Night.’ I am in that, but we also provided a lot of production services for that project. We found all of the locations. There were over thirty locations, which for a low budget picture is a lot of moving around. Obviously, we found them at a real decent price or they wouldn’t be able to afford thirty plus locations. We contributed a lot to the production. Like I said, I am in it. Gigi has a little cameo in it as a matter of fact. The project features a lot of good actors. John Hawkes, Chris Pine, Robert Pine, Lin Shaye are in it. Of course Chris is now Captain Kirk. We just had a cast and crew screening on that picture about two months ago. I was talking to Chris and I went, “dude, are you having people jumping out of bushes with cameras?” and he goes, “yeah.” I go, “well, I really kind of like my level of celebrity dude. I said, “I live in a small mountain community and everybody kind of knows me, but nobody is all over me and I don’t have to live in a compound or put walls up all around me, but you may want to buy an island somewhere in the Bermudas. He goes, “I know man.” Chris is a very fine actor and I hope now that he is Captain Kirk, people go back and look at some of the other stuff he has done. He was in “Smokin’ Aces.” He was great in ‘Smokin’ Aces.’ He was in ‘Just My Luck,’ the Lindsay Lohan movie. He was great in that. For a young guy, he embraces character parts. I think it is because of the way he was brought up with his dad and his dad has always been a character actor. He’s a terrific actor and he has his head really screwed on tight, which made me feel good because he was all of a sudden catapulted into this part and into this kind of situation that he is now dealing with. I was a little concerned about it, but after talking to him at this cast and crew screening, he’s good for it. He’ll do great at whatever he does. I would think that that would find distribution sometime probably sooner than later, just due to the cast.

Thanks to Leeanne for bringing this to my attention!

“I’m going to struggle and try my best to search out the roles that are a little more interesting and not based on how good your tan looks and how coiffed your hair is,” Pine said on the eve of the Geffen Playhouse’s production of “Farragut North,” a tense political drama costarring Pine and “Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth, opening Wednesday.

“There’s a battle between commerce and art that I’m learning that doesn’t necessarily have to prevent you from pursuing more artistic ventures, as long as you utilize your commerce, knowing you’re using it to get more opportunities to do the smaller pet projects,” he said. “I’m so new at it, I’m just learning to navigate the waters.”

So Pine, 28, has been studying the log of such other captains of his industry as Paul Newman. He says the late actor is his role model “in terms of longevity and the good he was able to do in the world.”

Pine’s other American idols?

“George Clooney, for the conversation about commerce and art. Daniel Day-Lewis for his almost monkish pursuit of protecting artistic integrity, which I’m in sheer awe of. I would certainly love to be held in the kind of esteem he is. Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, I’ve had an acting crush on for years. I’m all over the spectrum.”

Not really, if you consider the fact that all those performers are acclaimed for their acting chops. That’s clearly a goal of Pine’s and one he thinks he can balance with blockbuster films like “Trek.” That’s why his first role after the mega popcorn movie is the dark and complicated spinmeister Stephen of Beau Willimon’s “Farragut North,” named for the Washington, D.C., subway stop near the vortex of lobbyists’ offices.

source: latimes.com

Chris Pine steps back onto terra firma with the Geffen Playhouse production of ‘Farragut North.’
In 2007, Chris Pine was appearing in a Los Angeles production of Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig. He played the bad-boy pal, that cocky kid in the office who bends the rules for the sport of it. It was a secondary role, but Pine absolutely nailed it—a young actor to watch.

And people were indeed watching. He caught the attention of a Paramount Pictures exec who attended the Geffen Playhouse production. And Paramount was soon to be in need of a young Captain James T. Kirk.

Also in the Geffen audience were the director and CD in need of actors for 2008’s Bottle Shock. They nabbed Pine for the little film about an upstart Napa Valley winery in the sleepy 1970s, in which he was unrecognizable as a sunny hippie, the antithesis of his LaBute character. Playing opposite Alan Rickman in Bottle Shock, Pine apparently did what he is doing to this day: He spent his off time discussing theater. As Rickman last year recalled from their time on the set, “Chris and I talked and still do talk about theater and things he wants to do in the theater, which is reassuring in terms of somebody who just finished doing Star Trek and is about to have all that’s going to land on him through that—that he’s still got his eye fixed on a different horizon, or a parallel horizon. He’s a serious, and really talented, actor.”

Yes, the publicity and fan adoration from Star Trek has landed squarely on Pine. Nice, but seemingly not his goal in life. When Back Stage spoke with him, he was into the second day of rehearsals, back at the Geffen Playhouse, working on a lead role in Beau Willimon’s Farragut North. As Pine says, “At the end of the day, I want a long career, and I want a career made up of many and diverse roles.” The 28-year-old is well on his way.

RadarOnline.com has the scoop on Chris Pine’s latest acting role and we think Chris in the flesh is even better than seeing him on the big screen!

We were lucky to see the first night preview Tuesday night of the play Farragut North at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles with Chris starring along side an all star cast including Chris Noth, Olivia Thrilby, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Mia Barron, Dan Bittmer and Justin Huen. We won’t give you any spoliers, but Chris Noth surprised us as the political boss, and we loved the sparks that flew between Chris Pine and Olivia during their sexy love scenes!

The theater was packed and the crowd cheered loudly for Chris as he took his bow at the end of the show. And who could blame them? We definitely enjoyed seeing Chris dressed up in hottie suits on stage. The entire cast joined the young theater patrons at an private event after the show, and RadarOnline.com spotted Chris chatting with lots of excited fans.

But he’s not raking in the big bucks in this show. Although he’s starring in the biggest hit of the summer, our theather friends tell RadarOnline.com that the Star Trek stud did this play as a “labor of love,” and was paid favored nation status – which means that everyone in the cast made the same amount of money and our sources tell us this was NOT a big paycheck at all.

So why do we like Chris in this play so much? All we can say is you don’t get to see Captain Kirk strip down to his boxer briefs in Star Trek!

Thanks so much to Chris Alexander of RadarOnline for sending this to me!
source: radaronline.com