Stream It Or Skip It

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sitting In Bars With Cake’ on Prime Video, A Cancer Tearjerker That Will Remind You Of ‘Beaches’

Prime Video‘s latest original film, Sitting In Bars With Cake, is a lot of things at once: an homage to female friendship, a tragic tearjerker, a journey of self-discovery, and a love letter to pastry. In the film, Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’zion star as best friends Jane and Corinne, who come up with a plan for Jane to bake cakes and bring them to bars to meet guys every week for a year. Halfway through, Corinne is diagnosed with cancer, and, yeah, the film becomes a lesson about Jane learning to embrace life. It’s schmaltzy and sappy, but that’s okay, sometimes you just need to cry into your cake.

SITTING IN BARS WITH CAKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A series of cakes are placed on a table. The frosting on them reads, “The following motion picture is inspired by true events. I swear on my measuring cups.”

The Gist: Jane (Yara Shahidi) and Corinne (Odessa A’zion) are 20-something best friends who moved from Phoenix to L.A. together. Free-spirited, outgoing Corinne works for a high-powered music manager Benita, played by Bette Midler, and aspires to be a manager herself, while reserved, shy Jane is studying to be a lawyer, per her parents’ wishes, and would rather spend her evenings at home baking cakes.

On Corinne’s birthday, Jane bakes a cake and brings it to a bar, and it manages to attract every guy in the bar to her. Usually one to slink home early and avoid attention, Jane finds herself the center of it all, serving up cake and jokes to the rest of the patrons. So Corinne suggests that Jane makes it a regular routine: every weekend, the two women and their girlfriends will hit a new bar in a different Los Angeles neighborhood, serving up cake so Jane can come out of her shell and meet guys. They call it “cakebarring.”

One night after Corinne gets promoted to junior agent at her company, the friends all go out to celebrate, and when Corinne returns home, she has a seizure. After being rushed to the hospital, she learns she has brain cancer. Her Phoenix-based parents, Fred and Ruth (Ron Livingston and Martha Kelly), briefly come stay to help her with her doctor visits, until Jane convinces them that she can handle all of Corinne’s medical stuff herself.

Corinne becomes increasingly frustrated with her treatments, creating tension and fights with her boyfriend Dave and with Jane, which makes Jane’s role as caregiver more difficult, but at the same time, she’s finally coming out of her shell and starts dating a colleague from work, a legal intern named Owen (Rish Shah). Cakebarring works as intended, and Jane not only meets new people but she also gets the guts to tell her parents she doesn’t want to be a lawyer. Despite Corinne’s dire prognosis, her zest for life eventually teaches Jane to live her own to the fullest.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There’s only one reason Bette Midler is in this film, and that’s because it’s essentially a rehash of Beaches (otherwise, Midler and her many talents feel underused).

Sitting In Bars With Cake_Bette Midler
Photo: Prime Video/Saeed Adyani

Our Take: For all of its predictability (spoiler alert: Corinne dies), Sitting In Bars With Cake is elevated by a fantastic performance from Yara Shahidi, who plays Jane as a composed, by-the-book kind of woman who is happy to live vicariously through her vivacious best friend. When Corinne does become sick, Jane convinces Corinne’s parents she can take care of her best friend on her own, and though the pair end up having a fight at one point about how Jane is stifling Corinne, Shahidi plays Jane is with a sense of self-awareness and humor that makes her three-dimensional. You know she’s going to transition from rule-follower to dream-follower, but the flip isn’t just switched on at the end of the film, we see her more confident self reveal itself throughout the film, a transition that feels believable.

There are essentially two stories at work here, the one about Jane using her cake-baking skills to meet a guy, and the one where Corinne’s death exposes the harsh reality that Jane has been insulating herself too much from the world. The stories are woven together with one common goal, to make Jane realize she needs to live her life and take chances on herself, and while we all know it’s a nice tidy message, the writing and Shahidi’s performance make the tragedy of it all believable and not overly melodramatic. As Jane speaks to Corinne on her deathbed (where Corinne promises, very sweetly, to haunt her), she assures her friend that she’ll live enough for the two of them, and even this made-of-stone old hag got a little choked up.

Sex and Skin: Some kissing, and Jane goes to Owen’s house to have sex, though we don’t see it.

Parting Shot: In the final scene of the film, Jane delivers cake slices on a rolling cart through the hospital where Corinne received her treatment, and then we see her behind the counter at the bakery she’s opened with the help of Corinne’s old boss, Benita. In an epilogue, we learn that the film’s writer, Audrey Shulman, came up with the idea for cakebarring in 2013, and her own best friend, Chrissy, was diagnosed with cancer during her year of sitting in bars with cakes. A cake is placed on screen, with frosting that reads, “This movie is for her.”

Sleeper Star: As Corinne’s parents Fred and Ruth, Ron Livingston and Martha Kelly are delightfully quirky; he fixes anything loose or broken that he comes into contact with, even when the timing is inappropriate, she speaks in the driest, flattest monotone, yet they’re loving parents and treat Jane like she’s part of their family. And just when you think they’re one-note oddballs, it turns out they know all the words to Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sitting In Bars With Cake is a classic death-of-a-best-friend movie that’s got humor and heart, and just the right amount of sweetness.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.