If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out.
And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. (The fact that a young woman and a young black man are at the film’s forefront is also welcome.)Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: His focus is on staging a whiz-bang show, and the new additions, especially the charismatic Rey, with her endless derring-do, and the plucky Finn, are especially welcome. When I wrote about “Return of the Jedi” a while back in my book “Rainer on Film,” I described it as “a myth without a vision,” and to some extent that remains true even of “The Force Awakens.”īut Abrams isn’t really attempting to mythologize the saga here. I have always regarded the Joseph Campbell-inspired hoo-ha as so much deep-dish blathering. I am not one of those who subscribes to the mythology of the “Star Wars” saga. The film looks handmade, and this allows for a greater range of human emotion, too. There is, of course, CGI in “The Force Awakens,” but it’s comparatively minimal. One of the many problems with the prequels was their obsessive overreliance on CGI effects. The Monitor's View A great rethink on student debtĪbrams understands that “The Force Awakens” had to be both a tribute to the original films and a reboot. I’ll leave it up to you to wonder if Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker is in the mix. There’s also Harrison Ford as Han Solo, manfully holding down his role after all these years, and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia (except now she’s a general). Many of the old toys show up as well, and it’s like a reunion of old friends, including Chewbacca, R2-D2, and C-3PO. BB-8, a marvelous droid made up of revolving spheres and half-spheres, who is carrying information vital to the resistance, is a welcome addition to the Star Wars toy store. Finn (John Boyega), a renegade stormtrooper of the nefarious First Order (a military wing inspired by the Empire), teams up with Poe and crash-lands on Rey’s planet. There’s also Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a captured rebel pilot who is being tortured aboard a Star Destroyer by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a Darth Vader-ish bad guy. But let it be said that the action occurs 30 years after the end of “Return of the Jedi.” There’s a young woman, Rey (Daisy Ridley), who scavenges on a desert planet and is as feisty and formidable as a cross between Annie Oakley and Lara Croft. Reviewing this movie entails such a potential minefield of spoiler alerts that, for self-preservation, I think I will dispense here with most of the niceties of plot description. With sequels and spinoffs stretching ahead as far as the eye can see, Disney will undoubtedly make it all back many times over. Ironically, George Lucas was not creatively involved in the new film, which was directed by J.J.Abrams and co-scripted by “Star Wars” veteran Lawrence Kasdan and is being distributed by Disney, to whom Lucas sold the franchise in 2012 for billions. The good news is that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is easily the best movie in the franchise since “The Empire Strikes Back.” Unlike the dismal prequel trilogy that preceded it, or the too-slick “Return of the Jedi,” “The Force Awakens” has much of the spirit and inventiveness of the original two installments, “A New Hope” and “Empire,” its sequel. So it’s finally here, as if you didn’t know.