Best Picture Cheeses: 'American Hustle'

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Best Picture Cheeses: 'American Hustle'

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.

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Great Food Moments in Film: 'Flirting with Disaster'

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Great Food Moments in Film: 'Flirting with Disaster'

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.

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