Oh, the tween movie. Targeted at girls between the ages of eight and 14 and often directed by middle-aged men with questionable motives, the tweener flick is usually about a new girl or a clique of outcasts who battle with high school’s evil popular crowd.
These movies tend to be churned out with very little attention to originality, creativity or detail. Filmmakers bank on the fact that young girls are impressionable and often have undiscerning and na’ve taste.
Tween movies are also vehicles for unabashed wholesomeness–so-called “family entertainment” exploding with tired moral messages and void of anything that might challenge young girls or teach them anything about the real world.
The outcasts always triumph over the in-crowd, which would be a really great thing if the outcasts weren’t always every bit as thin, talented and attractive as their popular counterparts.
Sydney White, a modern bastardization of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves starring a very fake-and-baked Amanda Bynes (a tween superstar), is a robotic and mildly offensive film dripping with sickly sweet sap that will only resonate with emotionally imbalanced 12-year-old girls.
For the rest of us (including 13-year-old girls), it’s a waste of time-a very wholesome waste of time: a waste of time for the whole family (if you will).
The titular character, played by Amanda Bynes, is a bright-eyed college freshman that longs to join her dead mother’s sorority. She doesn’t fit in with her sorority sisters–she has brown hair, knows very little about fashion and isn’t nurturing an eating disorder–but she earns a spot in the organization as a legacy.
Jealous because Sydney is shooting up the university’s Myspace Hot or Not list, Rachel, the sorority president (played by Sara Paxton), banishes her from the sisterhood. Poor homeless Sydney is taken in by seven losers living in a falling-down dump at the end of Greek Row. The seven losers include a sneezy loser, a grumpy loser, a happy loser, a dopey loser and … you get the point.
Sydney treats the seven losers like they’re extremely mentally disabled, but they don’t mind because she’s sooo pretty and takes them on outings to the campus gymnasium to hang with the cool kids.
As Sydney’s popularity climbs, she wages war against the oppressive Greek Council by running for student body president. She and her seven dorks spend the movie trying to earn the votes of the other “outcast” students–specifically The Jewish Student Union, The Pacific Islanders Club, ROTC and the marching band.
The Jewish students are of course Hasidic, and the Pacific Islanders never take off their grass skirts and coconut bras. Otherwise, how would we know who they were?
Yes, this is all just as terrible as it sounds. Sydney White may be fairy tale rip-off geared toward younger viewers, but that’s no excuse to rely on stereotypes, archetypes and cheap emotional manipulation.
For instance, Sydney is supposed to be deep and unique because she enjoys construction work and often misses her late mommy. Her prince charming, Tyler Prince (Matt Long) is obviously a great guy because he volunteers at a soup kitchen. The seven dorks are dorks because they play video games and maintain blogs. Oh, and they never get laid (and of course Sydney won’t date one of them, regardless of how smart or interesting they are).
If you happen to be in Sydney’s target audience, you’ll most likely adore it because compared to other tween movies, Sydney White is pretty good. But it’s still a terrible movie.
The big problem here is that tween movies shouldn’t exist. Girls between the ages of eight and 14 deserve movies that do more than try to sell them dolls and underestimate their ability to deal with grown-up subject matter. I’m not saying that young girls should be watching Pink Flamingos or Back Door Sluts VI, but they deserve more than movies like Sydney White have to offer.