Feeling sick? Here are 5 movies to watch to help you feel better
CTV
Along with some painkillers and mom's chicken soup, the best thing to fight off a cold is taking it easy. CTV News film critic Richard Crouse offers up five movies you can watch to help make you feel better (Andrii Zorii / Getty Images)
Along with some painkillers, your mom’s chicken soup and plenty of fluids, the best thing to fight a cold is taking it easy. Rest and relaxation come in many forms, but for me, curling up in front of a movie always makes me feel better.
With that in mind, here’s a list of movies that are just what the doctor ordered.
Feeling feverish? Director Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” the surreal story of two U.S. marshals who uncover a shocking truth about an asylum on a remote island, is the kind of movie that feels like it was dreamed up during a low-grade fever.
Scorsese uses flashbacks, odd and deliberate lapses in continuity, weird camera tricks—he runs the film backwards in one scene, so it looks like smoke is flowing into, rather than out of Leonardo DiCaprio’s cigarette—to create an atmosphere of creeping dread, one in which the viewer, and perhaps even the characters, don’t know what is real and what is not.
Where many of his earlier films like “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are about a state of existence, “Shutter Island” is all about a state of mind. It’s a bold, risk-taking film, ripe with dramatic music, sweeping photography and unapologetically strange storytelling. It’s a story of paranoia, a deeply psychological thriller that pays homage to Hitchcock films like “Vertigo” and “North By Northwest.” Throw in a dollop of “The Snake Pit” and some Mario Bava you get an idea of the film’s feverish tone.
The flu can be a drag, but it’s nothing compared to the transmittable disease in “Pontypool,” a bug that turns regular people into flesh eating creeps.
Set entirely inside a small radio station in the basement of a church, the story focuses on announcer Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and call screener Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who use eye-witness accounts to slowly piece together the horrible story that is happening outside their doors.
