Travel

Whenever I try packing for a trip, I always find something unexpected in my luggage. 

As much as I want to bring her with me, I'm afraid she'd never make it through security.

(Illustration Friday: July 12, 2013)

True Celtics Forever!

Hi everyone,

Bad things happened this weekend that I can't wrap my head around. (I'm talking to you, Florida.) Among them, the "blockbuster" Celtics trade with the Brooklyn Nets became official: So long to Jason Terry (The Jet!), Kevin Garnett (The Big Ticket!), and Paul Pierce (The Truth!). It's clear to me Head Coach Doc Rivers left for the West Coast to coach the L.A. Clippers last month as protest!

I've been sad about trades before, but this summer's transactions are going to leave a scar! Do they know they've lost one of the best coaches ever? Did they realize they traded their team captain who has been with the them for his entire 15-year career? Who will be taking over for KG in the enthusiasm/intensity department? Who will master Jason Terry's suave 'n' smooth public relations skills?

At the last minute, they threw in  D.J. White into this group shipment to cover some sort of technicality. Note, he doesn't have a nickname that I know of, and I've run out of male cats to pay tribute. Simon offered to step in, but it's best not to confuse the rest of the team because we all know who Simon really is. Instead, Mini is thrilled to volunteer because she wishes she was as big and tall as the 6' 9" Power Forward.

Farewell to these Celtic stars, who I will miss seeing in green!  You may have moved homes, but you'll always be Celtics to me!

This drawing was inspired by photos and many, many memories of some of my favorite people.

Paul and KG loved watching the jumbo screen at the Garden.

D.J. White, Paul Pierce, and Jeff Green have some laughs.

Before each game, Kevin always talks to the post.

During the games, he screams a lot.

Jason Terry always flies around the court after a big basket.

After 10 years, MVP Paul Pierce takes in a championship moment in 2008!!!

It was awesome after such a long wait!!!!!

And, we were all thrilled!!!!!!!!

Okay, now I'm going to cry.

Going into the 2013-14 season, let's welcome Coach Stevens, some Brooklynites, and some newbies to Team Rondoooooo!!!!!!!!! (And, keep an eye on those Nets and Clippers games, because they have some of the coolest people over there now....)

Best,

Johnny Kitties: Celebrating Johnny Depp Film #34. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

[What is Johnny Kitties? See Johnny Kitties: Celebrating Johnny Depp for all the details.]

"I don't think any of us thought we'd be making another pirate movie, but here we are."  Director Gore Verbinski,
embarking on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest




What's happening now?

At least a year has passed since we last saw Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Today, Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Kiera Knightly) plan to marry, but they are rudely interrupted by Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), who calls for their immediate arrest for helping Jack escape during their last adventure. They will face the gallows unless Will comes through on his deal with Lord Beckett to retrieve Jack's compass. Presiding over the East India Trading Company, Lord Beckett wants to use the compass to help his business achieve world domination, including control of the seas.

Meanwhile, having just escaped a Turkish prison, Jack returns to the Black Pearl with a drawing of a key, which he and his crew set out to find, but his compass is no help in giving direction. On board, Jack is visited by Will's pirate father Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsguaard), who serves on the Flying Dutchman under Captain Davy Jones (Bill Nighy).

Long ago, heartbroken over a woman, Davy Jones cut out his own heart to end his pain, placed it in a chest, and buried it on land for safe keeping. Now, he spends his time on the high seas ferrying the dead to the afterlife and is only allowed on shore once every 10 years. Betrayed by the woman he loved, his curse has made him and his crew so much part of the sea that some have become more sea creature than human. The Flying Dutchman can even sail underwater.

Davy Jones once made a deal with Jack, allowing him to captain the Pearl on borrowed time. Bootstrap Bill now comes to Jack, marking his hand with the cursed Black Spot: His time is up and he must pay his debt, head to the no-man's land of Davy Jones's Locker, or face the dreaded sea monster Kracken. As always, Jack works to negotiate his way out of this situation. Having the key he's looking for, which unlocks the buried chest containing Davy Jones's heart, would solve all of Jack's problems.

Of course, everyone crosses paths during this adventure: Elizabeth escapes from jail and gets signed Letters of Mark that pardon her and Will from their crimes. She heads out to sea to find Will. While helping Jack retrieve the key from the Flying Dutchman, Will meets Bootstrap Bill on board and vows to save his father from his eternal fate. Norrington (Jack Davenport), whose life has taken a bad turn, is keen on retrieving the Letters of Mark from Elizabeth to help regain his previous stature, but he eyes a bigger prize once he learns about Davy Jones's chest and its contents. Add some hungry cannibals, some magic, and a giant squid into the mix, and you've got Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest! 

This one's for the boys.
When I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest in the theater, I had the weirdest feeling about seeing Johnny play the same character in a sequel. I never expected him to be in the position to make any sequels--or to want to, considering he likes to do his work on a project and move on. It was quite unsettling at first! But I got used to the idea, and I guess Johnny did too. "It's been amazing on every level," he says of working with the same cast and majority of the same crew as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. "We were on that film for such a long time; it was really quite a big shoot. So, you get really close. You become this weird sort of gypsy family, you know, the traveling circus."  

At first, I felt that Captain Jack was mainly in this movie for comic relief while everyone else had their deep dark secrets to deal with, but that's clearly not  the case. Everyone has equal story weight here, and it's just a given that Captain Jack is going to get most of the laughs. Johnny wanted to play Captain Jack again because there's so much to explore in the character, and he has so much fun doing it, which is obvious on screen. He is, as expected, a scene-stealer in this revisited role. For all the fans out there, watching the DVD bonus features is a treat because you learn all the details Johnny brought to Captain Jack and his story: Every article of clothing and accessory is hand-picked. Everything dangling in his hair means something. Even some of his rings and props are his own. I like the idea of Johnny bringing in his friend's peacock-feathered wand to work one day to use as his scepter on the cannibal island. (Johnny would have a friend who has that lying around.) Who else would think of these things?

As this movie went on, I felt the story got bogged down with battle after battle, darkness, rain, sea water, slime, grime, and cannibals! Even Elizabeth's wedding dress is already ruined when we first see it in the opening scene. Some of this movie's gross-out moments were tailor-made for all the teenage boys in the audience. 

But, as the laughter erupted shortly after the movie started, I realized that Pirates of the Caribbean is going to last forever for everybody! Everyone looked forward to seeing these beloved characters again, and the newly introduced characters became instant family members. Case in point, my favorite moment of this 2 1/2-hour action-packed ride was the last 30 seconds. Honestly, I nearly jumped out of my seat and screamed. Bring on Pirates 3! On my way out of the theater, kids were mimicking the sword fights in the halls using their fists and imagination. That's success!

It's a winner - slime, toes, beating hearts, and all!
I fell in love with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest while watching it again for Johnny Kitties! The story is full, complicated, and intertwined. When asked to write two sequels to their hit pirate movie, cowriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio opted to create a larger story, told over the course of the three movies. They envisioned the sequels sparking a community experience, where the discussion would go well beyond the films. "There was an intent to create Easter eggs, essentially. The more attention  you pay to the movie, the more you find in it," Ted Elliott says. Terry Rossio agrees, "There are things even in plain sight revealed in Pirates 3 to be more important than they might have seemed when watching Pirates 1 and 2. It's a lot of fun to do that. I think part of the appeal of these movies is that you're visiting a world where everything is connected." 

Everything in the film has a purpose and works to move the story forward. All of the characters have their own motivations--hidden or not--and they have to work together to achieve their goals. No one comes away from this adventure a clear hero.

 The new characters introduced in this sequel, Lord Beckett, Bootstrap Bill, Davy Jones, and Tia Dalma (Naomi Harris), are fantastic too: the actors give great performances and add so much to their stories. Also, the look of the Flying Dutchman and its waterlogged crew is so imaginative and detailed.

The impressive stunts include swinging bone cages between majestic cliffs and a three-way sword fight on a detached, spinning waterwheel. Of the latter experience, Johnny remembers, "It was such an absurd, such a bizarre, request for one grown man to ask of another: 'Okay, what we'd like to do now is bind you inside the wheel and give you a sword. And, we're going to tailor the other guy in and you guys are going to fight as the wheel is rolling, and you go upside down several times.' Nothing they could ask of me would surprise me anymore: 'Johnny, we're going to put you in a cannon and volt you out to sea. You okay with that?' Sure, let's do it." That doesn't happen here, but a lot of other stunts do that make this movie fun!

It was worth all the hard work.
"To be honest, the actual work that goes into it is really difficult, but it is so much fun doing it," Orlando Bloom says of working on the sequel. "I can't imagine it'll ever be done again like this; it sort of feels like the end of an era in making movies in this way because it's really a huge fete. I think we all feel very lucky to be doing it."
But the pressure was on: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest had a 200-day production schedule but took an entire year to complete. They worked backward from the release date but didn't even have a script for quite a while. On top of that, its sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, was scheduled to be filmed immediately following this one, mainly to ensure that the entire cast was still available. 

Filmed all over the Caribbean, Director Gore Verbinski sought out all the hard-to-reach places: "The only way a location is going to get picked by Gore is if you have to swim to it, hike to it, repel into it, or parachute into it," Unit Production Manager Doug Merrifield explains. "The more extreme and more remote the better." One of the locations is an island that completely submerges when the tide comes in every day. The cast ran and battled with swords while ankle-deep in sand in sweltering heat. Equipment had to be hauled on barges or moved by truck up narrow mountainside dirt roads.  

Obviously, CGI was used to create the Flying Dutchman's sea creature crew, among other things, but more than you would expect is real in this movie. Aside from the ships and sets they built, the crew developed a new technology called Image-Based Motion Capture to allow them to capture the actors' entire performances. Dressed in grey outfits spotted with green Ping Pong-sized balls that serve as motion points, Bill Nighy and the Flying Dutchman crew performed as if they were in full costume. Gore Verbinski could then work with them and the camera just as he would any live-action sequence. Their 3D images were later animated and transformed into sea creatures but without losing the facial expressions and movements of the actors in their performances. That's movie magic! 

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was filmed during the most active hurricane season on record. Hurricane Wilma did extensive damage to sets, equipment, and roads. Aside from the hurricanes, high seas even caused problems: If the waves reached 3 to 4 feet, the ships had to be evacuated because the sets were at risk of falling apart. Don't worry, it all turned out okay.  

In fact, this movie was even nominated for a bunch of awards and won quite a few, mainly in the special effects/visual effects department for good reason! Johnny was also nominated for and won some awards too because he's really good at being Captain Jack Sparrow.  

The Kitties are fighting!
This movie comes down to the hunt for Davy Jones's chest. Here, Captain Jack, Norrington (Simon), Will (Comet), and Elizabeth (Ashes) find it together but suddenly realize that no one can be trusted. They all want it for their own reasons. Because there's never a time when everyone's in the same scene (and because Davy Jones is tied to the sea), I had to embellish a little here with what I imagine is happening outside of the shot: Davy Jones watching and awaiting his fate aboard the Flying Dutchman. Will they work it out? Go rent the movie!  

What's next?
This saga concludes in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.  

Image credits: All Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest images © Walt Disney Pictures; illustration © Melissa Connolly  

Equality

Share the love!

(Illustration Friday: June 28, 2013)

Maya's Notebook

Hi everyone,

I didn't intend to read two Isabel Allende books in a row, but before I knew it, she had a new book out. The last book I read, The Sum of Our Days, was about 6 months ago, and I hadn't picked up another book until now. Isabel Allende gets me to read.

May 1st, she appeared at an event for National Geographic Live! at the National Geographic Society. I bought a ticket, thinking she was going to talk about her travels because the interviewer, Don George, is editor at-large of Traveler magazine. They are old friends since she contributed to a book he edited called Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales From Great Fiction Writers. In the event description I saw, they only mentioned his book, not hers. But, when I got there, I found her latest effort, Maya's Notebook, on display and snatched it up.

The heroine of this story is Maya Vidal, a teenager whose life crumbles when her grandfather dies of cancer. Lost without him, she begins to drink and steal. When she runs away from home, she gets into worse trouble, suffering horrific sexual assault, battling alcohol and drug addiction, and entangling in serious criminal activity. To escape the shady characters of her past and impending federal charges, Maya is sent by her grandmother to Chiloe, an island off mainland Chile. With little connection to the outside world, this quiet place helps Maya come to terms with her past and dream of a brighter future.

As with all Isabel Allende books, a cast of colorful characters helps Maya along the way. Burdened by their own problems, she helps her new friends uncover their own histories and hidden connections so that they can all move forward in their lives. The layers of hardship peel off Maya and those around her as she reconnects with who she used to be before tragedy struck and addiction took over. No one starts out that way.

I started this book at a slow pace, impatient to find out why Maya is on a plane, headed to a far off island. But that structure gave way to plenty of  mystery and cliffhangers: The story skips around as Maya writes about her present, past, and family. The reasons for why she is the way she is, where she's been, and where's she's going are revealed when she gets to them. The people she meets along the way are similarly introduced with their co-occurring stories. Soon enough, you won't be able to put the book down. And, don't worry, it'll all comes together as only Isabel Allende can make it.

In person, Isabel Allende is a warm, inviting spirit who chats like she's known you forever. I suppose that's what makes her such a great storyteller. After rattling off a detailed account of this book's wild plot, impressing the interviewer into momentary speechlessness, she quipped, "A good idea, isn't it?" Despite catching a cold while traveling on her book tour, she still made us feel appreciated: "I love to see you. I love this part [of touring]. You all love me, so why wouldn't I want to come here? But getting here is a pain."

And, as usual, she kept us laughing: Acknowledging her best-selling author status, she credited Oprah, who selected her book Daughter of Fortune for her book club. (Read it!) In addition to the initial 150,000 copies of that book already printed, 600,000 more were instantly ordered and ready within the week. She nodded at our gasps, "That shows you the power of Oprah!" When asked whether she missed her privacy since becoming a famous author, she shook her head, "I'm famous among people who read. There are very few. I'm not a rock star."

 Here's an excerpt from the National Geographic Live! event, so you can get a taste for yourself.



I'm disappointed they didn't show here how enamored Don George is with Isabel Allende, which was endearing in the Chris Farley sort of way. Early on, this happened:
Don: "Having you in my life is one of the great treasures and riches of my life."
Isabel: "Oh God! Maybe you are my Plan B!"
Don: "Oh, wow! What an honor! I should put that in my bio!"

If you watched the video above, you know that at the end, he asks her what her dream is. What they edited out is that, after responding, she asks him the same question.
Isabel: And, what is your dream?
Don: For this to go on forever and ever.
Amen to that!

Best,

It's summertime!

Happy Summer, everyone!

"Summertime" Bilie Holiday (George Gershwin/Porgy & Bess)

Views from the Top

Hi everyone,

On June 8, I climbed Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park. The plan was to hike to the top, eat lunch, do some yoga in front of a spectacular view, and come back down. Unaware of what I was in for, I got home scraped, bruised, and exhausted 12 hours later.

The Kitties were worn out just from hearing about it, except for Lily who was just glad I got home. That makes two of us!

(Illustration Friday: June 14, 2013)

We got some good views along the way, at least....

Enjoy!

Kiara and I hold it together.

Flowers even grow on mountains!

Children

The Mother Kitty has six.

(Illustration Friday: June 7, 2013)

Johnny Kitties: Celebrating Johnny Depp Film #33--Corpse Bride (2005)

[What is Johnny Kitties? See Johnny Kitties: Celebrating Johnny Depp for all the details.]

For this year's birthday fundraiser, Johnny's Angels created a scrapbook of birthday cards, which was sent to Johnny as a gift. (Above, you can see was I drew inside mine.) Last I heard, we raised more than $5,500 for Children's Hospice and Palliative Care Coalition in Los Angeles.

You can join the celebration today by donating to Johnny's Angels' campaign. Then, eat some cake and maybe watch Corpse Bride! Here's more about that lovely movie, this month's Johnny Kitties feature.

It has its own very, very special, very unique look, movement. And it's beautiful. And, also, it's like a lot of great things: it's a dying art. Johnny Depp on the stop-motion animation used for Corpse Bride

It's a perfect match!

Have you ever been in the situation where, nervous on the eve of your wedding, you go for a walk in the woods to practice saying your vows, and you slip the ring onto a branch, pretending it's your bride-to-be's finger; but the branch turns out to be an actual hand of a dead lady who grabs you, accepts your proposal, and drags you down to the Land of the Dead to live happily ever after? That's what happens to Johnny's character in this movie.

Corpse Bride is a stop-motion animation film directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. The story takes place in Victorian England where two families have arranged the marriage of Victor (Johnny Depp) and Victoria (Emily Watson) for the sole purpose of marrying into wealth. After a disastrous wedding rehearsal, shy Victor practices and perfects his marriage vows during a walk in the woods and slips Victoria's ring onto a branch that comes to life.  He finds himself married to the corpse bride (Helena Bonham Carter) who drags him "downstairs" to the Land of the Dead. Torn between two worlds, Victor must decide whether to fight his way home to his true love or stay in his new, more welcoming community.

I want a wedding invitation!
"That sounds like a movie Tim Burton would want to make," I thought when I heard its story was based on Jewish folklore about a guy who accidentally marries a corpse. It seemed to be a perfect fit, and the more I heard about it, the more excited I became about seeing it! When I first saw the "coming attractions" preview for Corpse Bride, I knew it was going to be special! Look at it!



Beautiful, right? Who knew dead people could be so cute?

Some weddings are difficult to plan.

Positioning the puppets...

For stop-motion animation, puppets are painstakingly positioned and shot frame-by-frame. Tim Burton's featured it in his movies before (see Pee Wee's Big Adventure, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Frankenweenie.) He's a fan and so am I! Corpse Bride was a project in the making for 10 years, as Tim Burton waited to get all the right people involved. "A lot of people get sucked into doing computer stuff, but there's still this great group, a rare group of people, that are still into this type of animation," he explains. "There's just an energy that gets infused into these puppets from these amazing animators, and there is something quite special about moving an inanimate object frame-by-frame."   It's tedious, hard, physical, fascinating work with spectacular results.

And setting up a scene...

At least 85 characters and 200 puppets were built for Corpse Bride. "Stylistically, stop-motion offers something very unique, which is every single thing you see on screen was created by a crafts person or an artist," Art Director Nelson Lowry says. At the forefront of stop-motion animation is codirector Mike Johnson, who oversaw the day-to-day process on this project. For this film, the crew used computers for the first time to assist in the process, perfecting the quality and flow of the animation. "A lot of people thought that computers and digital technology would be the death of stop-motion animation, but really, it's bringing it forward," he says. Shooting the film digitally allowed the crew to see the results instantly and make changes as needed. They used the computers to trigger the camera to shoot the frame and move on to the next shot. "So much of this is a traditional, old-fashioned method of shooting a film," says Producer Alison Abbate. "With the advent of CGI, audiences have become very used to a very slick look, and I think stop-motion's charm is in that it's not slick and not feeling like it's made in a computer. It's nice to sort of walk that fine line between keeping it in the realm of beautiful and a slickness just because it's so flawlessly executed."

The finished product is very much Tim Burton's vision. Most of Corpse Bride's characters are based on his drawings. "Tim had a very clear idea of how he wanted the puppets to look and he'd been working on designs, sketches, and paintings before we met up with him," Puppet Maker Peter Sauders says. While he designed most of the characters on his own, Character Designer Carlos Grangel brought them to life, though they brought on new challenges. His characters are typically tall and skinny with tiny feet, so the team had to explore different ways to engineer the puppets' joint systems to support the weight of each character and its heavy, complicated head. These models were built in a new way with gear- and pulley-filled heads that allow for freer facial expressions. "People get very attached to the characters they're working on and I think, especially with this project, the character designs are so fantastic that people want to make every element of that puppet shine," Puppet Maker Ian Mackinnon says. "They have spent hours on every little detail of that character."

It shows!  In 2010, I saw some of the drawings, paintings, and puppets created for Corpse Bride in an exhibit on Tim Burton's career at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because of the detail involved, they are perhaps more amazing in person than on screen. "They do such beautiful work," Tim Burton says of the animation crew. "These puppets are very sensitive and textural and really like Swiss watches, they're made so nicely!"

The stars aligned!
This cast of voices for Corpse Bride is dreamy! With Johnny is a bunch of my favorite Brits: Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Albert Finney, Christopher Lee, Tracey Ullmann, Johanna Lumley, Michael Gough, Paul Whitehouse, Jane Horrocks.... Can you imagine having all these people in the same room together? Well, keep imagining. "I have scenes with Johnny Depp, Johanna Lumley, and Albert Finney, and I've never met them," Emily Watson admits. "I was shown work in progress of the way things look and the style of it, but you're sort of trying to make it happen in your head, really." So much for that fantasy. In any case, these actors are perfectly cast. "It's a fairly low-budget movie," Tim Burton says of Corpse Bride. "I was very lucky and grateful to get people to do voices for just the love of doing a project."

One of my favorite special features on the DVD is seeing the actors speaking as their characters in their solitary recording booth next to the actually scene they are playing out. They all get animated in that booth while reading their lines, and their reactions translate into the final scene. "When you're recording your voice, you do find yourself moving as the character within the parameters of the microphone and everything," Johnny says. "There's a kind of great spontaneity in that." Helena Bonham Carter, whose work in Corpse Bride stands out to me, agrees: "It's nice to act something when it's so not dependent on what you look like. You can completely create a character, and you're not limited by your own physical envelope. That's fun and, in that way, it's very liberating. In a way, it's sort of pure acting because you don't really have anything. You can be completely selfish. You don't have any marks to hit."

For Corpse Bride, Tim Burton worked with his long-time collaborator Danny Elfman, who wrote the score and voiced the skeleton character of BoneJangles. Like Tim Burton's work, Danny Elfman's music is just as instantly recognizable. For this movie, some of it's haunting, some of it's sweet, and some of it's funny. It's another perfect fit.

And we all got a happy ending!
When Tim Burton described it to me....it sounded really scary, Gothic, and horrible," writer/lyricist John August says of the story's premise. "And, yet, we ended up making a really charming movie. You don't really think about the characters being dead or alive. You sort of see it as this really sweet little love story."

The artistry and passion that went into the making of Corpse Bride is undeniable. This charming, bittersweet, scary, funny, fantastic, beautiful work of art earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. But who needs awards? "To be able to see these characters in the studio environment, against the sets and speaking dialogue and what have you--It's been a great revelation." Puppet Maker Peter Saunders says. "You think, 'Wow, that's what it's all about!'"  

Marriage is hard. 
It's hard to match the artistry on display in Corpse Bride and decide what scene to highlight. I chose the moment when The corpse bride (Mini) realizes that Victor is trying escape his current situation and return to his fiancee in the Land of the Living. She'll have none of that and drags him back "downstairs." I see her point: She's his wife, after all.

What's next?
Johnny heads back to sea in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

All Corpse Bride Images © Warner Brothers Pictures; illustrations © Melissa Connolly