No matter what happened at the Oscars this year, Children of Men was one of the very best movies of 2006 – hell of the last decade. And fuck you if you disagree.
One of the things that makes the film so damn great is how immersive the world is, and that’s partially achieved through the omnipresence of TV screens with ads, news broadcast and other future ephemera playing on them. The company that did the video for these bits, The Foreign Office, has a look at what they created for the film in Quicktime for at their site – click here to see it.
If you don’t have HD-DVD, this will be the only way you can see that stuff. A press release dropped into my box about the film’s March 27th DVD release (click here to pre-order!) lists “Ads & Propaganda” as one of the HD exclusive features, and I suspect that this footage is what they’re talking about.
Here’s the rest of the features (although commentary isn’t listed. Boo!). Not that shabby:
The Children of Men DVD and HD-DVD include exclusive looks behind-the-scenes with the critically acclaimed film’s creators and actors including:
* Deleted Scenes!
* Possibility of Hope – A chilling documentary features the world’s leading futurists and philosophers examining social and economic shifts that find expression in Children of Men.
* Theo and Julian – In exclusive on-set interviews, actors Clive Owen and Julianne Moore offer up insights and secrets about the complex and compelling characters they have created in Children of Men .
* Futuristic Designs – Director Alfonso Cuarón created an original and dynamic vision of the future for this film. Follow his vision as it goes from concept to seething cinematic life in this featurette.
* Visual Effects: Creating the Baby – Uncover the incredible visual effects used to create a life-like baby in the film.
* Men Under Attack – Children of Men features amazingly realistic scenes of the chaos and violence and groundbreaking, Oscar®-nominated cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, called by Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers "a weaver of visual miracles." This mini-documentary breaks down two of the most terrifying scenes in the film – the café explosion and a car under violent attack from all sides – to show how the filmmakers created sequences in which "You don’t just watch the scene, you live inside it, ducking each fresh, ferocious assault."
The HD-DVD version of Children of Men will also feature U-CONTROL, Picture in Picture and ADS & PROPAGANDA