MAY (2002) A hoot, if you like to watch blind kids hurt themselves May is one of those "descent into madness" movies that seem to attract the weird ones. I don't generally get a lot out of these movies - if I'm going to watch somebody descend into madness, it helps if they start out sane, and they never do. May opens with a bloody eye-scream (woohoo!) only to follow it up with dismembered doll pieces falling in slow motion (how first-year-film-school is that?). As a child, the titular May was raised by a tightass mother who made sure that lazy eye of hers always kept her feeling self-conscious. As a grownup (played by Angela Bettis, in familiar territory after the Carrie miniseries), she's shy and, er, weird. There's no getting around the weird, especially once Jeremy Sisto dares her to gross him out. In spite of this (and a little bit because of it) she does attract the interest of a few people, including Sisto as an auto mechanic with dormant dreams of filmmaking, and Anna Farris as a spacey coworker who keeps using cheesy, transparently seductive lines on her. Both of them figure out a little late that some lonely people should just be left alone. Things were moving along all right in this movie until May is able to get a volunteer job working with blind kids. Don't you need references to work with kids? Who would May use for a reference? At one point she brings broken glass for the blind kids to touch. "Can you tell me what this is?" I think it's a lawsuit. Not long after that, May finds her "mission" of sorts, and she loses just about all her awkwardness and becomes smooth as...well, not like Catherine Zeta-Jones smooth, but smoother than most people I know. Pretty much becomes a different character entirely, after just one scene too. It's like she suddenly had access to all these social skills she didn't demonstrate before, skills which for most of us are hard-learned, even if we sometimes forget them. I might've been able to buy that, if she'd started out sane. BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE