Sitting In Bars With Cake Review: -Watch It or Skip It?
You’re going to need a lot of cake for this one…
- written by Joy Onu
- 4 min read
- 10 Sep, 2023
“Sitting In Bars With Cake” served a deeper purpose than the title would make you think at first glance. If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking, this is going to be light, a little dramatic here and there, and that’s it, but that’s not it… I mean, it is in some instances, but it is so much more.
The premise of Sitting In Bars With Cakes lies on the shoulders of a true life story. Years ago, Audrey Shulman with the help of her friend, came up with an unconventional way to get a man; sitting in bars with cake, literally. The goal was to bake 50 cakes, one cake every week and then take it to bars around Los Angeles. They eventually came up with a name for it, Cakebarring.
An added advantage to the whole experiment was that she also got to write about her cake adventures on her blog, what started off as a cute dating experiment, ended quite bittersweet as midway through the whole thing, her best friend was diagnosed with cancer.
Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’Zion play Jane and Corrine (both in their 20s) so beautifully, together, they celebrate this particular female friendship in a way that feels raw and authentic. Jane is the exact definition of an introvert who doesn’t like to go out much, and barely has a social life. Corrine on the other hand, is the life of the party, she lights up every room she walks into and she pushes Jane to do this experiment in a bid to push her out of her comfort zone a little bit.
The script does a great job of conveying the dynamic between the two friends, the transitions between the name of the cake for the night and the actual cake hinges between the lines of creativity and sometimes unimportant. The star power in this movie is quite impressive, there will be a lot of familiar faces along the line, and it will make you even more invested.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably take pauses in between just to find out more about the real life story the movie is based on, my advice to you; Don’t do it, wait till after the movie is over instead. The beauty of the film can only be felt without any interruptions, so be ready to be in your feelings, it all goes downhill the minute Corrine has her first seizure, we can’t emphasize enough how sad it is to go from a cute story about cakes, to the very idea of watching your best friend battle cancer.
“Sitting in Bars With Cake” has everything, it has a cute romance going on, and if you’re heavy on the romance, this might not cut it for you, as the love story between Jane and Owen was so underwhelming and underexplored, there just wasn’t a lot of screen time for the potential romances. On another hand, if you came here for the platonic friendship between these two women, then there’s a lot of that.
The entire movie in itself is a reflection of life, of someone’s life specifically, so it’s no wonder that there’s chaos, there’s love, there’s cake, there’s beauty, and unfortunately, there’s death. In our humble opinion, that makes it worth the watch, a story as profound as this deserves to be seen by absolutely everyone.