MySky HDi … Movies Greats in March

Yahoo! The magnificent, majestic 2003 western, Open Range, next month will premiere in HD on Sky Movies Greats.

It’s not yet out on Blu-ray so its March 18 debut will delight those who have seen it only on DVD (inexplicably, it was never released theatrically here, despite in many ways being a finer film than director Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves).

Like Wolves, it mourns a shrinking frontier but this time it’s cowboys who are the endangered species, “free grazers” who were hounded off the open range by rancher barons with their hired guns and barbed wire.

Costner and Robert Duvall play two stubborn cowpokes who refuse to move on when threatened by tyrannical cattle king Michael Gambon.

What ensues echoes not only Wolves and Unforgiven but virtually every other western where there are “things that gnaw on a man worse than dying”.

Both richly romantic and starkly unvarnished, Open Range is a breathtakingly beautiful and heartfelt, elegiac take on a genre that still stirs the soul like no other.

A slew of other modern classics, along with lesser titles, also will screen in HD on Sky Movies Greats for the first time next month, including:

Pretty Woman (1^st)

The Italian Job (4^th)

Rocky (6^th)

Something’s Gotta Give (7^th)

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (10^th)

Planet of the Apes (12^th)

Silence of the Lambs (13^th)

Dark Blue (16^th)

Bad Boys (17^th)

Schindler’s List (20^th)

The Thomas Crown Affair (21^st)

Bad Boys 2 (26^th)

Chicago (27^th)