Sitting In Bars With Cake (2023)
Corinne and Jane have been friends for years although they couldn’t be more different. They’ve moved out to LA together after their college graduation, where they work at the same publicity firm, with Corinne as an assistant and Jane in the mail room. Jane is as shy as Corinne is loud, but their friendship works.
Since Jane is good at baking, Corinne gets the bright idea that she should take a cake to a different bar every week to attract men. She calls it “cakebarring,” and she and Jane post a list of bars on their apartment wall along with a list of cakes next to a map of LA, where all the bar locations are marked with pins and yarn.
Then Corinne gets diagnosed with brain cancer, and as time goes on things look worse and worse. Jane wants to shelve the cakebarring until Corinne is better, but Corinne won’t hear of it, and Jane not only keeps baking, but she becomes Corinne’s caretaker, and along with Corinne’s parents, watches and waits as Corinne’s health deteriorates. The cakes, however, must be made.
Sitting In Bars With Cake is based on the true story of Audrey Shulman, whose best friend Chrissy joked in 2013 about the idea of using cake to meet guys. Just as in the movie, Chrissy was diagnosed with brain cancer and passed away in 2015. Shulman continued making cakes after Chrissy died and authored a cookbook based on her experiences. As Shulman put it, cakebarring kept she and Chrissy busy as opposed to being at home with their fears all the time, researching brain cancer on the Web.
Shulman took quite a few liberties when she wrote her screenplay. It’s not mentioned, for instance, that Chrissy’s parents were also nursing Chrissy’s sibling who was suffering from a brain disease at the same time as Chrissy’s cancer treatments. Shulman worked as a writer’s assistant instead of in a mailroom when she first came to Los Angeles and is now a screenwriter and author, not a professional baker.
There are a lot of things this movie does right. It’s nice watching Jane come out of her shell and find what she’s good at. The friendship between she and Corinne is very inspiring—these two are so close they’re like sisters. It’s interesting and heartwrenching to watch Jane and Corinne’s parents find their various ways of supporting each other through Corinne’s illness. There’s even one scene when Jane and Corinne’s dad go to a pottery painting store only to deliberately smash both of their creations on the sidewalk as soon as they leave by way of catharsis.
The film has a very effective way of marking time through the cakes themselves, although it might take a bit to acclimate, as the types of cakes are announced in various ways, such as words on a Christmas ornament or a Post-It on the fridge. It’s not only a way to keep track of where the year is at, but it saves the viewer from wondering what kinds of cakes Jane is baking.
That said, I thought the movie was tonally spotty. Given the nature of the story it’s inevitable, but a lot of downshifting is required of the audience; one minute Corinne and Jane are living it up at some bar with their friends, random guys, and Jane’s latest cake, and the next minute they’re at home discussing their fears. It’s not so much a problem from a story standpoint, but I had to keep my finger on my remote’s volume button because there were such drastic changes in the sound levels and the dialogue in the quiet scenes is a little hard to understand.
Speaking of the dialogue, it had the feel of a Lifetime or Hallmark movie trying and failing to be edgy. There’s a lot of talk about sex. There’s even one scene when the characters go to a drag club and one of the performers swings a giant dildo around. How the film got a PG-13 rating is a mystery, but either way, the sexual elements are huge turnoffs and dilute the positive parts of the story.
That’s why I can’t give Sitting In Bars With Cake a higher rating. What should be a nice tearjerker about friendship and loyalty is hidden behind flotsam likely inserted because it’s expected as opposed to warranted, and that’s a real shame.
Sitting In Bars With Cake is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated PG-13.
My grade: C-
Principal Cast: Yara Shahidi, Odessa A’zion, Bette Midler, Ron Livingston, Martha Kelly, Mia Mitchell, Charlie Morgan Patton, Simon Recasner, Rish Shah, Aaron Dominguez, Will Ropp, Adina Porter, Navid Nagahban, Diep Tran, Reshma Gajjar, Kayla Njeri, Jeremy Olson, Andrew Goetten.
Directed by Trish Sie.
Written by Audrey Shulman.