‘Sitting in Bars With Cake’ Review: A Lumpy Friendship Tale With a Bittersweet Bite

variety.com:

Amy Nicholson Ten years ago, the screenwriter Audrey Shulman whipped up a wacky plan to land a boyfriend: She’d barhop using a homemade cake as bait. “The cake was magic because it made me a magnet,” Shulman blogged at the time. “Suddenly every boy within spitting distance was looking at me, silently forming an action plan on how to come over.” She adapted her blog into a book, and her book into a movie, “Sitting in Bars With Cake,” that, with a decade of perspective, shifts focus from her romances to her roommate, who was diagnosed with cancer midway through the dating experiment.

What began as a singles guide is now an ode to platonic friendship, the kind of piano-tinkling weepie that makes you cry even when some of the ingredients don’t work.

Shulman and the director Trish Sie have added Gen Z flavor, rejiggering the story to star Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’zion as twentysomething best friends who chart a mission to bring dessert to every male demographic in Los Angeles.

Using criss-crossing lines of red string, they target tech bros, cowboys and ironic hipsters across a pinned-up city map. Locals, however, will notice the production favors goofy real-life theme bars with a similar crowd — think tiki, burlesque, roller-rink drag shows, Clifton’s Cafeteria and the Redwood — that make LA’s nightlife look extra delightful at the expense of scrambling the girls’ supposed goal, which blurs from vague (meet different kinds of men?) to vaguer (or just be more social?).