Sydney White 2007

Our fair maiden Sydney (Amanda Bynes) doesn’t have coal-black hair or sing with a sweet voice or have woodland creatures following her around. Instead, the tomboy grew up on construction sites with her widower dad (John Schneider), a plumber who guided Syd as best he could. But now the time has come for the gorgeous freshman to head to Southern Atlantic University to pledge her late mom’s once-dignified sorority, where she meets this story’s version of the Wicked Queen: the vain and evil Rachel (Sara Paxton), president of the sorority. Let’s just say Sydney does not fit in, and Rachel sends the soon-to-be fairest of them all to the curb. Luckily, there’s a condemned frat house right next door, with seven very socially challenged guys--each with a familiar "Dwarf"-like quality. They take Sydney in, and soon, with the help of one love-struck frat boy named Tyler Prince (Matthew Long), she and the seven doofuses campaign to take over the student government—and push out the Greek system that has ruled for too long.
Acting Tween sensation Amanda Bynes knows exactly where her bread is buttered. With star vehicles such as What a Girl Wants, She's the Man and now Sydney White, the comic actress keeps playing slightly different versions of the same character: a pretty, if goofy and klutzy, young woman whose vivaciousness usually changes everything for the better. And whether her fluff movies grate or not, you can’t fault Bynes, who clearly knows what works for her. Paxton (Aquamarine) is perfectly predictable as the mean girl, . But the seven guys playing the nerds do a nice job of reinventing their dwarfishness, be it sneeziness, sleepiness, bashfulness, dopeyness—you know the rest. The only dork who didn’t quite mesh with his inner-“Dwarf” was the one called Spanky (Samm Levine), who is more horny than “Happy.” I guess in the fairytale there really isn’t a Lusty dwarf, even though you’d think at some point at least one of them must have had a few untoward thoughts about Snow White. They were little but still men.