'Sydney' stumbles on its satircal path

Buried deep, deep, deep inside Joel Nussbaum's "Sydney White" lies a clever modern look at the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" tale. Instead of an evil stepmother who believes she is the "fairest of them all," we have a prissy university student body/sorority president with the rather clever name Rachel Witchburn (Sara Paxton). Instead of the mirror on the wall, we get a Facebook contest in which university students vote on who is the hottest babe on campus. Instead of a poison apple, we have a hacker who destroys the hard drive on the laptop where the title character (Amanda Bynes) is working on a major school project. And, instead of dwarfs, we get seven university dorks who are outcasts from the main student body.

We also get a Prince Charming, named Tyler Prince (Matt Long, pictured here with Ms. Bynes), who awakes Snow ... er, Sydney ... with a kiss after she has pulled an all-nighter in the library rewriting her major school project.

The fact that there are some clever takeoffs on the Snow White tale makes it all the more shameful that the movie is ravaged by ethnic and racial stereotypes and and wrong-headed look at the title character. In the original Brothers Grimm tale, Snow White is a heroine who is the center of the action but not the initiator of it. Snow White does nothing at all; things just happen to her.

Sydney, on the other hand, becomes a political student revolutionary, a university version of Lawrence of Arabia who unites all the various independent factions to rebel against the fraternity/sorority clique that controls the campus. And that is where the real problems are revealed.

The college, Southern Atlantic University, is often referred to simply as "state," which, at least to my way of thinking, makes it a public university. Yet, this university is more snow white than the movie's inspiration--I don't remember seeing one black person in the entire film. OK, maybe an eagle-eyed viewer could spot one in one of the party scenes but only for a fraction of a second.

The film does trot out other minorities --Jews, gays, etc. -- but only to treat them as stereotypes and inadvertently holding them up to ridicule.

I am not sure the original folk tale as collected by the Brothers Grimm was supposed to have a morale. I think it was just supposed to illustrate the popular idea from the Middle Ages of "evil vs. innocent."

In Sydney White, however, Rachel isn't evil as much as she is defined by her own narrow existence and Sydney, while pure, cannot be described as innocent. And the movie's morale is that "We are all dorks." If you believe that, this films is for you.

Grade: D-