Sydney White

Sydney White (2007)

--Joe Nussbaum

This film is supposed to be like an updated version of the Snow White fairy tale. Sydney (Amanda Bynes) goes to university and wants to pledge at the sorority that her now-dead mother did back in the day, but runs into trouble from the head of the sorority who is jealous that Sydney has gotten some attention from the head of a male fraternity. Yeah, so Sydney doesn't make it into the sorority because of this, instead she moves into "The Vortex," a run-down housing unit for outcasts. Hey, guess how many dudes live there? 7! Get it? Sydney decides that the greek system must go down because they have been running everything on campus for too long and the other groups need some financial attention as well. So she gets the 7 guys to run for student council (though this kind of disappears and only one of them ever is mentioned as actually running) in order to take down the president who is also the head of the sorority that she didn't get into.

Okay, maybe that was way too long of a plot summary for a movie that probably none of you will ever see. This isn't a very good film. It has an interesting idea, but mostly that's because it relies on our shared cultural knowledge of fairy tales. This "update" is pretty dumb though. There is nothing remotely interesting or intriguing and it makes me wonder who ever thought that this was a good idea in this form? I also found myself getting really sad at the realization that this film took up many hours of hundred's of peoples' lives and it turned out to be such crap. Isn't that weird? Films receive so much attention and so many people contribute money and skillz to getting them produced and finished, but the majority are just bad.

Also, Amanda Bynes is known for her quirkiness and her comedy, especially the physical kind, but that was noticeably absent in this film. There were a few times you could see her trying to bring some of that into the film, but it failed and I think the film would have been a lot better if more of that had been written into it, instead of trying to make it into some sappy romantic comedy. And she didn't look like her stylist really had a grip on how to make her look good, which is sad I guess?

Anyway, there is one good thing about this film (besides Sydney's love interest being kinda cute), Danny Strong who played Jonathan on Buffy is in it! He plays grumpy and he's just so awesome. Especially because he played someone who was supposed to be lame and weak and geeky in Buffy. Well, he still plays someone geeky in this film, but I love the misanthropic bent. I guess some of the other "dwarf" characters (no, they are not played by little people, sorry) are kinda funny too. There's this African exchange student who just sleeps all the time. Guess which dwarf he is. And the character of dopey is kinda funny too, though I don't think the character "Spanky" was really all that "happy," unless by happy they meant horny. And maybe they did.

I guess maybe another part wasn't that bad. At the very beginning, when Sydney meets the person she's rooming with, who's named Dinky, she kinda just seems like a "dumb blonde" character, but I'm glad they didn't really follow-through with that representation. It was nice to see a more realistic portrayal of friendship amidst superficiality and social pressure. So yay for that. The movie was still overall bad though.