Meet the Flex and the City girls. Clockwise from top, Colette Nelson as Carrie, American Gladiator Jamie Reed as Charlotte, Antonia Schmitt as Miranda, and Lena Squarciafico-Sanchez as Samantha.Photo: Melissa Hom
We’ll admit it — the hype surrounding next week’s release of the Sex and the City movie is too much. And maybe the flourishing of the Bradshaw brand is speeding up Manhattan’s slow morph into a sterile shopping-mall hellhole. But, on any given night before going to bed, we’ve been known to flip to a rerun at eleven o’clock and, within minutes, find ourselves enjoying the bittersweet chords of friendship and self-knowledge that the episodes routinely pluck. The virtues of the show vis-à-vis the Zeitgeisty idiocy it spawned are sort of akin to Jesus and the Vatican: You have to distinguish the soulful wit and wisdom of the former from the overinflated, sparkly nonsense of the latter.
In other words, we’re kind of protective of the show in spite of ourselves.
So when Heavy.com, the men’s-entertainment Website that produced this geriatric re-creation of The Hills, called us last week to see if we wanted to come out to Williamsburg to watch them shoot Flex and the City, re-creations of iconic SATC scenes with professional female bodybuilders, we were kind of, like, “Euch.” It sounded faintly misogynist and un-funny to us. And even if the four women playing the famous SATC quartet, all of them from Long Island, did kind of look like Fire Island muscle gays swaggering off to a drag tea dance, they were so nice and such good sports that we suddenly felt protective of them.
Colette Nelson, who plays Carrie and was one of three women in the country to be named World Universe bodybuilding champ, explained that she didn’t feel any less girlie than the women on the real show. “People think I must be dominant, but that’s not my personality whatsoever,” she told us. “I got into bodybuilding because it covers up some insecurities within yourself. So as much as we look strong outside, on the inside there’s weaknesses. The women on the show have body issues, but so do we, but on a different level.”
Now do you know what we mean about not wanting these gals to be used by the fratty Heavy guys in a sort of mean way? Well, the results are in. You can watch the first “episode” for yourself. What do you think? We still just don’t think that, overall, it’s that funny. Or is it maybe telling us something we don’t want to hear? —Tim Murphy
