SYDNEY WHITE
Director: Joe Nussbaum Stars: Amanda Bynes, Matt Long, Sara Paxton, Jeremy Howard, Crystal Hunt, John Schneider, Jack Carpenter, Adam Hendersholt, Danny Strong, Samm Levine, Arnie Patoja, Brian Patrick Clarke
Reviewed by GREG KING
Squeaky-clean former teen poppet Amanda Bynes (Big Fat Liar, Hairspray, etc) has recently found her niche in taking classic tales and giving them a contemporary makeover. With She’s The Man, she took Shakespeare’s classic play Twelfth Night and set its plot of mistaken identities and love against the background of college. With her latest film Sydney White, Bynes gives us a similar take on the classic children’s story Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.
Bynes plays Sydney White, a tomboy raised by a widowed plumber, who goes to college on a scholarship. But she quickly runs afoul of Rachel Witchburn (Sara Paxton, from Aquamarine, etc), the narcissistic student body president and head of her sorority, who dominates the campus. The magic mirror here becomes a web site that judges who’s hot and who’s not on campus, but when Sydney’s popularity quickly rises, Rachel becomes jealous and plots to bring her down. She summarily evicts Sydney from the sorority,
Sydney finds a haven in the dilapidated sorority house known as “the vortex”, because it sucks in all the losers. Rachel’s pet project is her plan to demolish the campus eyesore and turn it into a “Greek centre”, which will be her legacy to the college. Before long though Sydney has made it her mission to turn around the lives of her seven roommates, nerds who enjoy playing video games but who have no social skills whatsoever. Determined to wrest control from the domineering Rachel and her sorority Sydney also mounts a campaign to run against Rachel in the forthcoming elections for student body president, Sydney takes to campus politics with flair, gathering support from a number of other disenfranchised campus groups. Sydney’s uncompromising nature also attracts the eye of the handsome Tyler Prince (Matt Long), Rachel’s former boyfriend.
Sydney White is nothing that we haven’t seen before, but Bynes does have a certain charm and charisma that carries even the most jaded audience along for the ride. Sydney White is the first feature script from Chad Gomez Creasey, who has written a number of episodes of tv series Pushing Daisies. With its rather cliched structure and plot, Sydney White owes a considerable debt to the far superior Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, and even Revenge Of The Nerds.