Chris Pine

We routinely write here about the kind of people whose “Early Life” section is very heavily blue. Heck, I’ve written about people who have a Wikipedia page for their family. We aren’t quite at those levels yet, but Chris Pine is not the first person we’ve covered here whose article will be linked to a relative’s and he won’t be the last. He’s a lot better known than she is, and I’m not really saying he shouldn’t be—for one thing, his films are more prominent now than his grandmother’s were in her day. Still, Anne Gwynne was a good actress, and it clearly runs in the family.

He still did a fair amount of minor roles before he hit it big. You’ve got to start somewhere, and he started with ER. He’s not alone in that, though I don’t care to hunt down all the people for whom it’s the case. That’s more exhausting than you might think. Still, he got a CSI: Miami and a TV movie or two and a few indie movies and so forth. He was cast as Anne Hathaway’s love interest in The Princess Diaries 2, but who remembers Anne Hathaway’s love interest in The Princess Diaries 2?

And then he was cast as James T. Kirk. Now, I don’t like James T. Kirk, as it happens, and I don’t like NuTrek much at all. I do like Pine better as Kirk than I do William Shatner, low bar though that may be. I thought Pine was, you know, okay. But I’m not inclined toward a rewatch, because I’m not a big fan of the whole thing. Still, it’s the thing that launched, if you will, Chris Pine from the ranks of “did an episode of American Dreams (remember American Dreams?) once” to being part of the debate about whether or not we still have movie stars.

I mean, he is, still, one of those people who makes me wish I liked the movies he does. He’s never the problem. (No, I haven’t gotten to the Dungeons and Dragons movie yet.) Okay, Into the Spider-Verse. But on the other hand, Into the Woods, a movie I actively loathe in no small part because of how much I love the original Broadway production. I will say that Pine is in the best bit, the version of “Agony.” But almost all the movies of his that I’ve seen rise no higher than “fine, I guess.” Then there’s Wish, actively the worst Disney animated feature I’ve ever seen.

Is he the Best Chris? My regular readers will know that I do not think so. Still, he’s an Extremely Good Chris. He, too, seems to have a sense of humour about the whole thing. He, too, seems kind and smart and caring. He, too, has actively worked to encourage voting. But he doesn’t seem to have the same history of charity work that Chris Evans does, and while he does have gorgeous eyes, I don’t think he’s as attractive. Not that it’s a high priority for the Best Chris sweepstakes. He’s definitely Best Chris With a Scream Queen Grandmother, though I can’t imagine that’s a crowded field.