“In a world … where men worship flannel … and even hookers don’t put out on the first date … one man learned the difference … between love and loonies … ”

Not to be outdone by its colonial cousin Australia, lately immortalized on-screen by Oscar-nominated director Baz Luhrmann, the proud Commonwealth Commonwealth Realm of Canada has commissioned its own eponymous sweeping epic, this one starring national treasures Dan Aykroyd and Alanis Morissette as two lovers separated by language, ideology, and the great Molson-Labatt debate.

Click here to see the whole poster!

Executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, the 300-minute tentpole will be helmed by Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan, whose 1994 heavy-breather Exotica remains the only film about sex ever to emerge from the Great White North (the triple-X-rated ouevres of Peter North and Brandon Iron excluded). The music will be composed by Christophe Beck, whose score for Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther won favorable comparisons in Chatelaine magazine and Toronto’s Globe and Mail to Henry Mancini’s original.

Rounding out the cast will be Donald Sutherland, as a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police whose border-side empire of duty-free shops becomes an underground railroad for draft-dodging Americans; Celine Dion, as a militant Québécois separatist who cuts ties with Morissette after she takes up with Aykroyd’s Ottawan bureaucrat; and Mike Myers, in full Dr. Evil mode, as a poutine-munching French-Canadian terror-cell leader plotting to kill the Queen of England during a royal visit to the Chateau Frontenac.

Martin Short makes a brief but arresting flashback-scene cameo as Raymond Paley, Canada’s first known skiing fatality, and Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot sing the film’s stirring theme song, “Where the Rivers Run Gold,” commemorating Canada’s little-known but highly consequential Battle for Yellowsnow.

Developing!