CineMorsel: 'Ratatouille'
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GASP! Oscar season is upon us! Updated charts coming soon...
CineDrunk: Final 2014 Oscar Predictions
/Oscar weekend is here! Listen in as we drunkenly babble on about our predictions and personal favorites in all 24 Oscar categories. With little consensus and lots of unpredictability, it's going to be an exciting year!
CineMeal: 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'
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At CineMunch we're all about exploring the similarities between film and food, and what better way than by creating the ultimate dinner-and-a-movie experience? The best CineMeals (you knew that was coming) tap into the essence of a film, sating your immediate hunger while whetting your appetite for the screen magic to come. Puns are encouraged (a la ParmaSean Penn Roasted Broccoli), and a certain amount of bending the rules is expected (cheese before and after the main course? Done and done.)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which we're celebrating all week, requires special attention, and we've curated a meal below that complements and elevates the viewing experience. Here's hoping this gets your culinary juices flowing. Let us know in the comments what would be on your Eternal Sunshine menu!
Best Picture Cheeses: 'Her'
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One of the best new cheeses around is Miranda, an absinthe-washed wonder lovingly crafted by Jos Vulto of Vulto Creamery. Starting out as a cheesemaker in Brooklyn, Vulto aged cheese in a crawlspace beneath a city sidewalk, and now operates a creamery in Walton, NY, just a few hours north of New York City. Vulto Creamery represents no-nonsense cheesemaking at its best, honoring the milk of the animals and the tradition of making cheese by hand and in small batches.
Read MoreBest Picture Cheeses: '12 Years a Slave'
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In 1997 Max Schmidhauser created the semi-soft goat cheese Tomme Crayeuse as an answer to a top-selling French classic known as Tomme de Savoie. The latter is a perfectly fine cheese (I like to channel my inner cow and pretend I’m munching on grass while eating it), but Tomme Crayeuse’s flavors run deeper: from fresh earth to bright citrus to the gentle tang of goat’s milk. A visual stunner as well, it’s spotted with white and yellow molds against a marbled gray rind concealing an ivory paste. In its prime, the cheese is a lichen-covered rock after a rain shower, a painter’s splattered studio floor.
Read MoreBest Picture Cheeses: 'Gravity'
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In space there are few straight lines, no clear up or down, and no earth to stand on. Flat planes of existence disappear and the world asserts its full three dimensions, enveloping your body in its grasp.
Not that I’ve been to space, but this is how I perceive it to be, and how Alfonso Cuarón makes us feel while watching his miracle of a movie, Gravity.
Best Picture Cheeses: 'Philomena'
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Across the wide Atlantic in a place called County Cork, Mary Burns has been making Ardrahan Farmstead Cheese for the past 30 years. Ardrahan, the pride of the Burns family and one of the great Irish cheeses, feels traditional, like a common lullaby or a national dish. Its friendly coating of rusty-orange B. linens creates a mild pungency—think aromas of barnyard and gym socks—while underneath lies a buttery, meaty paste evoking milk from happy cows and summer days spent skipping stones at the seashore.
Read MoreBest Picture Cheeses: 'American Hustle'
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First, an explanation. This is CineMunch, where the Cine veers decidedly toward the Oscars and the Munch nearly always involves cheese. So why wouldn't we choose a cheese for each of this year's Best Picture nominees? We wouldn't not. Here's installment #1.
Ameribella is stinky. It's what cheese people call a washed rind, the term for cheeses washed in a saltwater brine (or beer, or wine, or cider) as they age. Washing encourages the proliferation of Brevibacterium linens, the friendly neighborhood bacteria that imparts all manner of pungency to a cheese. Depending on the make process, the type and character of the milk, the conditions in the aging room, etc., B. linens will manifest as body odor, rotting fruit, or gym socks. Alternatively, you might detect sulfurous eggs, wet newspaper, or barnyard. If you're lucky, all of the above and more will come shining through, singing their ballad of stench through your nose and palate.
Great Food Moments in Film: 'Flirting with Disaster'
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In this, the inaugural installment of Great Food Moments in Film, in which CineMunch dissects and digests the scenes that legitimize our efforts to force food and film together into something coherent, we bring you the great cheese attack of Flirting with Disaster.
Sure, Flirting with Disaster may be most noted for its writer/director David O. Russell, whose recent films Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle have swept two awards seasons and swept up Jennifer Lawrence in Hollywood's starmaking machine. And sure, the plot focuses on Ben Stiller's character and his quest to track down his birth parents.
But dig deeper and you'll find the real star of this show is Mary Tyler Moore, who, as neurotic-New-Yorker-slash-adoptive-mother Pearl Coplin, turns violent in her first scene. There's nothing like a marital scuffle to incite a game of "Where's the Closest Weapon?" and in this case the answer is a wheel of Brie.
