ST The Last Jedi wins AARP award as Best Film for Grownups

http://variety.com/2018/film/news/star-wars-the-last-jedi-best-movie-for-grownups-award-1202688723/



Supporting a theory on the board, Luke’s crisis of faith and guilt issues in The Last Jedi was a hit with the 50 and over crowd.



https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/movies-for-grownups/annual-film-awards/

This is from people who were kids in 1977 and who are Luke’s age now and can possibly better relate to regrets and crisis of faith issues and who’ve known people who’ve been overcome by these things.

Click the link for video.

 

This sounds like some made up award.

I don't have much faith in these news magazines either after Newsweek was recently outed as engaging in traffic fraud.

 

I find this VERY ambivalent to say the least.

My dictum is that your best friends don't tell you what to want to hear but what you need to hear.

Being a part of that aforementioned crowd, I know that it won't do me any good to procrastinate things and to shut myself away. Some people over 50 may come up with plenty of excuses to do so, but I can't help but feel that's the wrong thing and the wrong message.

 

The message that it's wrong to shut yourself away...

 

But that's the thing Luke Skywalker had been doing for a considerable amount of time given the backstory of TLJ, and if he hadn't billions of people could probably still be alive.

 

Well I'm not sure how Luke was meant to stop the First Order...

But the film ultimately decides that it was wrong for Luke take the Jedi out battle.

 

Recent winners of the Best Film award include 12 Years a Slave and The Theory of everything starring Rogue One alumni, Felicity Jones as Hawking’s wife.

 

“Made up award”

As opposed to all the awards which get to some essential truth of the objective quality of the thing about which they are awarding?

 

This follows the Golden Tomato award that The Last Jedi Won as the best Fantasy / SciFi film of 2017, beating out Bladerunner 2049.

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/rt-hub/golden-tomato-awards-best-movies-tv-of-2017/

 

TLJ wins some awards.

Reaction on this board:
"IT MUST BE A MADE UP AWARD."

Priceless.

Well-deserved. RJ created a marvelous film and outstanding addition to the saga. I really can't wait for the Blu-Ray.

 

Outside of hard core fandom and right wing sites I suspect TLJ is the most highly thought of fantasy since Return of the King or Perhaps the revamped Planet of the Apes. TFA didn’t win the Golden Tomato award or the Best Film of the year from the American Reitirees Association and the actual critic score average (not just whether they liked it but how much they did) is one of the highest for any action/adventure since Planet of the Apes, The Dark Knight Trilogy and LOTR.

The division exists within the fandom and political communities primarily.

 

I hereby select this post as the winner of the prestigious "Best Post in the 'The Last Jedi wins AARP award as Best Film for Grownups' Thread Award".

 

I would turn up in a tuxedo to collect this

 

Firing Lord and Miller, hiring Benioff and Weiss, now this Best Film for grown-ups award. . . are kids still the Star Wars target demo? I'd feel better with some reassurance that they are.

 

"Star Wars is for twelve year olds." - George Lucas

 

Anecdotally makes sense given my crowd experiences with the ST thus far. Oldest crowds I've personally observed since the Pride and Prejudice with Knightley.

 

Sigh. SW is still for all ages. It's great, though, if this award shows that TLJ resonated especially well with one of the age segments of viewers.

 

TLJ is easily the most grown up of all the SW films.

 

Agreed. The themes are more relatable to adults. I don't think younger children get so much of the regrets, challenges and lessons that the characters go through TLJ.

If Star Wars was made for 12 years old, my feeling is that TLJ may be more for > 40 years old.

My feeling, of course, not a definitive truth or anything.

 

I feel similar. If I was younger, like some of the people who grew up on the prequels, and I’d become used to Star Wars explaining everything overtly and performances nominated for Razzy awards never took me out of the pictures at all, I might not appreciate some of the strengths of the ST as much either. I’d perhaps be more upset at screentime spent on psychological drama and crisis exploration within a retired veteran dealing with issues of guilt for that taking away precious screentime from some Kenobi-style saber duels from the PT but I’m older now (though not anywhere near retirement age) and I love that the only real struggles for a Jedi near the end of their life would be more internal than external and that Johnson gave Luke one final arc related to hero’s journey to overcome and reach enlightenment to become one with the Force.

Retirees can understand the value in gathering the strength to realize mistakes and also the value in living out their days in the place of their choosing.

In some ways it’s almost an old age fantasy what Luke is able to do in the end. One final moment to help people he cares about, look as he did in his prime, make ammends with family and inspire the world with action and then exit the world at the place of his choosing in a moment of pure beauty related to adolescence. I’m sure a lot of older people wish they could do that and there’s something magical about the notion that these people who empathized with Luke’s struggles versus his father as kids in 1977 are now empathizing with his struggles as a senior unhappy with some poor choices made in life and also the choices some of the younger generations in his family have made.

 

How do you get from "old people like this movie" to "are kids still the Star Wars target demo?"
Are "old" people now forbidden to enjoy something?
Just because there is an award handed out in the name of grown ups, doesn't mean that young people somehow don't like it or aren't part of the target audience. There is absolutely no connection between the two statements.

It's not like Benioff and Weiss taking charge of a project definately means that it will be just like Game of Thrones. Steven Spielberg has directed extremely serious movies (Schindler's List, Munich) as well as fun action or adventure movies (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park). Just because you are famous for a specific project, doesn't mean that this style is all you can do. People can do more than just one kind of project.

 

Best film with cute droids for grownups. People of all ages have regrets. But, for me, while I feel it needed edited down and the score was lacking, I find BR2049 a better 'film for grownups' or adults.

 

I liked BR2049, and it was visually stunning, but I found TLJ more resonant and explored fresher territory than BR did, which was mostly a lot of stuff that's already been said.

 

I feel prematurely old for identifying with some of the messages in The Last Jedi and found myself once again inspired by Star Wars. About 21 years ago (February 1, 1997) as I say sometimes here on the boards, I walked into a theater as a 14-year-old kid to see Star Wars on the big screen. I thought I'd seen this movie like 50 times, no big deal, but better see what all of the hype is about. Everyone at school kept talking about it and actually I found it kind of silly, like bringing back this old movie to theaters? Ok. Then I walked into the theater and there you guys were, all of my now fellow fans, dressed up in costumes some of them, others just T-shirts, everyone hollering, yelling, and cheering all of these parts of the movie. My god, this was not the VHS thing I had been watching, I mean whatever you think of the SE changes doesn't matter to this point, this movie looked practically new! It didn't look 20 years old. I was kind of blown away. But it wasn't just the movie itself -- which gave me goosebumps almost like I had never seen it before, I guess the ads were right ("if you've only seen it this way [TV], you haven't seen it at all") -- it was the atmosphere. Realizing, wow, if a movie can inspire this level of devotion in people, I want to be a filmmaker myself.

Then fast forward to The Last Jedi, where my childhood dream inspired by Star Wars came true. I was a filmmaker. I've made award winning music videos, short films, and a feature film that's available online. That movie got me in the Director's Guild of America which is just something I read about in the trades and dreamed about as a kid. But as with many film stories, my feature film was just one of many indie features out there, lacking big star power, it didn't launch my career in the way I had hoped, it was successful artistically but not financially, and then I ended up focusing more on my corporate video production company (where we've had clients like Paul Mitchell, Grant Thornton, Charter Spectrum, Perricone MD, etc.). Unglamorous work that was meant as the backup plan to pay the bills and has often left me feeling just downtrodden, not excited to start the day, or the week, and creatively in limbo. Going into TLJ, kind of a rough few years, hadn't accomplished much in the way of my dreams lately, felt a lot like Luke on that island in exile. I left Los Angeles long ago, dismayed by my failures, and focusing way too much on the past.

Seeing TLJ, and hearing Yoda talk about failure being the greatest teacher, even hearing Kylo (the one thing I completely agree with him on -- "Let the past die, kill it if you have to. It's the only way to become what you were meant to be"), it made me realize I was focusing too much on what hasn't went right and on a past I can't change, rather than seeing what's right before my eyes. Which is that I'm still only 35 years old, healthy, with that same ambition inside of me that was there in the past, and it was time to learn to use those failures as lessons rather than as reasons to sit around not doing what I want to be doing.

So I started writing again in January, finished a feature length screenplay by the first day of February (just a first draft), and now I'm outlining my second script of the year. I'm letting the corporate work take a back seat and pursuing my passion, because I have the freedom to do so, and the realization that the only barrier to success is letting your past failures get in the way of continuing to work hard. For me, then, TLJ was almost like coming full circle for Star Wars, like another lesson that I probably should have realized without needing to watch a blockbuster fantasy movie, but that hit me as especially personally relevant. Like Luke, the self-imposed exile and moping about is over, and now it's time to become legend.