dreamattack | a dialogue in pictures

sometimes it seems like she’s already made
herself a ghost, and I already can’t stop
grieving over the hole where she used to be.

Dear Wyeth Ayerst, manufacturer of Effexor® XR (venlafaxine HCl),

Today rivals as one of the worst days I’ve ever had. Why in the hell would you manufacture and distribute a drug that can be so destructive upon discontinuation?

Are you trying to kill off the patients who have had such horrible experiences on your drug so that they don’t snitch on you to the FDA?? Because you’re close to being successful with this one.

It’s taking marked physical restraint to keep from attacking myself and clawing the skin off my skull. Is that a symptom listed in your abstract?

This is the second time I have attempted to stop taking your fucking evil drug. The fist time I literally almost spun off into the stratosphere of insanity. This time at least we have been augmenting the reverse titration with another medication, and it has helped, to a point.

Yesterday was my first day with zero Effexor in my system. I didn’t realize I’d hit the bottom of the taper until my brain began to shudder and shake. Because the half-life of your drug is so short, my synapses let me know within hours that I have “missed a dose” by administering shock-like shivering sensations to my head.

Now it’s all I can do not to break out into spontaneous weeping, scream obscenities, and/or injure myself in one or more of the varieties of ways that are dancing around in my mind.

People try to find any excuse to leave the room and get away from me. I think they’ve had enough of me. I don’t blame them. But I do blame you, Mr. Drug Corporation.

If I’d known that your drug would do this to me, I would never have begun taking it. It’s an amazing allure - the initial sensations of feeling better. Whatever happened to informed consent?

Relief won’t come too soon. But what will I have left when my head finally clears?

Sincerely,

S. Plant

I can’t explain why I feel so depressed tonight. Maybe I’m not happy with my life. Maybe it’s all in my head. I can’t seem to fill up the hole inside me. It’s like a bottomless pit. Perhaps it’s only the overwhelming frustration with my own ineptitude, the burning malaise, coupled with the fact that generally speaking, I don’t much care for myself. Is it that evident? How I fail to care for myself on a daily basis? How I really couldn’t care less what happens to me? How I even occasionally delight in my own pain, the feeling coming from a deeply rooted source of satisfaction, knowing that it is all, ultimately, deserved?

Intractable

peering through the fog.

Ten-thousand jangling wires
make melody;
a disembodied blare
from hidden music boxes torments.

Scratchings, cries, and sounds of waves
and winds. I found certain
images and rhythms crystalizing
in my mind.

I am now seized by a
feeling of weakness.
a swimming in the head;
silverfish spinning their bellies
against my taut synapses.

Tightness, tension in the head;
over-drawn gravity spins
singularities between my ears.

Beats my brain in unrelenting whispers.

peering back,
through the fog.

– s.plant 1.03

Jim Carrey raped the corpse of my childhood,
Mike Myers flipped over the body and sodomized it.

- - - -

Journal & Courier - Lafayette, IN / Bob Bloom:
“Universal last gave us
Jim Carrey as Grinch.
And when it got panned,
they didn’t even flinch.

They turned right around
and just like that,
they put Mike Myers
in the hat of The Cat.

And now Dr. Seuss
has again been abused.
For The Cat in the Hat
on film is ill used.

It’s not even for kids.
it’s not even funny.
To be totally honest,
it’s a waste of money.

It lacks the magic of Seuss,
of his lasting words.
On film, this Cat
is just for the birds.

Myers lacks charm,
he’s creepy as the Cat
Someone else should have donned,
that big feline’s hat.

He’s unctuous and grating.
he’s sure no laugh riot.
Too many entendres
for a kids’ movie diet.

The wisdom of Seuss
is missing in action.
The laughs are so scarce;
they’re only a fraction.

A mom and a neighbor
pop onto the scene:
Kelly Preston, Alec Baldwin
with not much to glean.

The film’s writers forgot
An important detail.
The lessons of youth
are the meat of this tale.

The Cat is a letdown,
I ruefully confess.
Once again the studio
has made Seuss a mess.

So here’s what I say,
this is my hook.
You’d be better off reading
your children the book.”

read more reviews -

Chicago Sun-Times / Roger Ebert:
“It’s another overwrought clunker like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” all effects and stunts and CGI and prosthetics, with no room for lightness and joy.”

ReelViews / James Berardinelli:
“It’s moderately engaging for the first half-hour, somewhat trying during the second half hour, and virtually unbearable over the final twenty minutes. It’s a marginally recommendable film for kids, but not necessarily for parents.”

USA Today / Claudia Puig:
“Long on visual dazzle but short on warmth, and the humor is excessively raunchy for a family film.”

Chicago Tribune / Mark Caro:
“Although a literal movie adaptation of Seuss’ 1957 classic “The Cat in the Hat” might have run 20 minutes, is it too much to ask that the filmed material preserve the author’s sensibility?”

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) / Liam Lacey:
“A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.”

Chicago Reader / J.R. Jones:
“Grazer’s writing team has filled up the film’s 82 minutes with winking product placements, SNL-type goofs, PG gags premised on not quite cursing, a Smashmouth cover of the Beatles’ “Getting Better,” and a lame subplot about a scuzzy lothario (Stephen Baldwin).”

Charlotte Observer / Lawrence Toppman:
“As a British politician said of a corrupt but articulate peer, “The Cat in the Hat” is like a rotten mackerel seen by moonlight: It shines as it stinks.”

Christian Science Monitor / Gloria Goodale :
“It’s a sort of soullessly cheerful cynicism that is about as far from Seuss as one can imagine.”

Entertainment Weekly / Owen Gleiberman:
“Someone (Myers?) came up with the bright idea of turning the Cat in the Hat into the worst Vegas nightclub spritzer of 1958. He’s become a furry version of Rip Taylor: a walking, talking vaudeville idiot box.”

Miami Herald / Connie Ogle:
“Charmless and grating and immediately forgettable.”

New York Daily News / Jami Bernard:
“Everything to treasure about that magical, slightly malevolent feline of childhood verse is obliterated in the coarse, charmless Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat.”

Philadelphia Inquirer / Carrie Rickey:
“It pains me to tell you, But really, it’s true: The Cat in the Hat Is a piece of dog doo.”

Rolling Stone / Peter Travers:
“Talk about your quick-buck exploitation.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer / William Arnold:
“Where “The Cat” book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.”

Los Angeles Times / Manohla Dargis:
“Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.”

New York Times / A.O. Scott:
“A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.”

Salon.com / Charles Taylor:
“The movie is crass and vulgar almost beyond belief.”

TV Guide / Maitland McDonagh:
“Frenetic and cheerless action aside, the film’s real problem is the Cat, who looks most unmagically like a second-string college sports mascot and conducts himself like a risque baggy-pants comedian.”

Boston Globe / Ty Burr:
“If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel’s body and hung it from a tree, they couldn’t have desecrated the man more.”

Austin Chronicle / Marc Savlov:
“They’ve taken a classic (the classic, I think) and they’ve battered it senseless and, boy, does it stink. It’s so bad it’s amazing it’s being released, and box office-goers might soon end up fleeced. And annoyed and bewildered, perhaps even creeped-out by this cacophonous mess which is awful throughout.”

Dallas Observer / Gregory Weinkauf:
“Such a remarkable rift between its charming source material and its heinous cinematic realization that the producers may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: Asshole in Fur.”

New York Post / Megan Lehmann:
“The narrative itself, attributed to three former “Seinfeld” writers who also worked on “The Grinch,” reeks of desperation.”

Village Voice / Michael Atkinson:
“Comes scarily close to being the most unendurable Hollywood creation of the last dozen years.”

Wall Street Journal / Joe Morgenstern:
“An abomination, impure and simple.”

Slant Magazine / Ed Gonzalez:
“Doctors have been known to advise women to read Seuss to their stomachs during pregnancies. But if Seuss’s ridiculous rhymes can smooth out a few jumpy trimesters, Cat in the Hat the movie is nothing more than a miscarriage.”

Kinnopio’s Movie Reviews / Craig Roush:
“I let loose a sigh of relief when the movie’s end credits started to roll, until I realized that a year after he published The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss also turned out The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. With the right amount of dollars, so may Mike Myers, a thought that should have Theodore Geisel rolling over in his grave.”

Planet Sick-boy:
“I really did not like The Grinch
It hurt just like a painful pinch
I would not watch it full of drugs
I’d sooner eat a billion slugs
Some things should be left as books
Not made, half-assed, by H’wood crooks
I like the spy with rotten teeth
But this looks vapid, like Yasmine Bleeth
I really hope it doesn’t blow
It’s still my job to frigging go.”

San Jose Mercury News / Bruce Newman:
“Other than an occasional token rhyme, this “Cat in the Hat’’ lands flat-footed and with tin ear, drained of its essential Dr. Seussness.”

Critic Doctor / Peter Sobczynski:
“There is no joy or whimsy to be had at any moment in the film (except possibly for the part where the Cat, mistaken for a pinata, is beaten with baseball bats), only the grim experience of seeing another childhood icon raped by a bunch of greedheads who, based on the available evidence, have never actually cracked the spine of a Dr. Seuss book in their lives. Unless you have children who have been especially naughty and who are in need of severe punishment, avoid this film like the plague and stick with the original book.”

L.A. Daily News / Bob Strauss:
“Everything that was sly, charming and instructively subversive about Theodor Geisel’s 1957 masterpiece has been made generic, vulgar and destructively ill-mannered on screen. Someone is going to pay.”

Hollywood Reporter / Kirk Honeycutt:
“If a movie ever disproved the old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words, this is the one.”

E! Online:
“We crossed our fingers/Our hopes were high/But oh, how quickly this flick went awry.”

Film Blather / Eugene Novikov
“Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat is not a movie so much as assault. A blasphemous adaptation of the classic children’s book, the film bombarded my senses for 82 minutes, trying to pound me into submission but succeeding only in making me surly for the rest of the evening. The perversion of the Dr. Seuss spirit is intolerable.”

L.A. Weekly / Ella Taylor:
“I can hear Theodore Geisel — who knew better than most that when faced with a decent story, children can sit still for ages without being clowned at — groaning from the grave.”

Dallas Observer / Gregory Weinkauf:
“This Catty movie seems doggedly determined to pee on anything clever, touching or creatively inspiring the book ever had to offer.”

One Guy’s Opinion / Frank Swietek:
“Get out the flatware, mother–the Thanksgiving turkey has arrived, even if it is in feline form. The Jim Carrey movie based on Dr. Seuss’s “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” had its problems, but it seems a positive masterpiece beside this horrendous travesty based on “The Cat in the Hat.””

Juicy Cerebellum / Alex Sandell:
“The Cat in the Hat is a mess. It’s a slapdash piece of slapstick slapped together for some quick holiday cash. The movie underestimates children and is insulting to adults. Dr. Seuss would be spinning in his grave, if he saw what Hollywood did to his beloved children’s story.”

Splicedwire / Rob Blackwelder:
“Seuss Abuse: I don’t remember a rave scene with a cameo by hoochy hotel heiress Paris Hilton in Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat,” do you?”