What is happening?

Sam Darnold is MVP?

Is this the real world?

From Jersey I heard…

J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS!

Voices now quiet.

Answer honestly.

Trevor Lawrence or Flacco?

I’ll take the latter.

(1) Can the Bears eliminate their drive-killing penalties? Case in point: Sunday against the Rams. The Bears had several drives derailed, and positive plays wiped off the books, by penalties from players who are meant to be the stars of this offense, namely Darnell Wright and Cole Kmet. You can forgive the backups coming in with limited practice time. You can’t forgive Kmet not understanding snap counts.

(2) Can the Bears stop the run like they used to? The Bears are 11th in yards allowed and 10th in points allowed. Those are sparkling rankings considering how little help they’ve gotten from the other side of the ball. But if this is going to be a top five unit, they will need be better than 17th against the run. (They were first in 2023.)

(3) Can this receiving corps assert itself? DJ Moore, Rome Odunze and Keenan Allen were supposed to be the strength of this roster. They have not been. Even when Caleb Williams has had clean pockets, there’s been nothing available to him down the field. Whether that’s the players, or the scheme, it has to change for this offense to take significant leaps the remainder of the season.

(4) Can the Bears get to the bye at 4-2? Again, early season is about accumulating wins, and the next two opponents are a combined 1-7. The Bears would be fine at 3-3 at their break, but 4-2 would set the stage for what many of expected from the 2024 campaign: a playoff push.

These notes/summaries were written during the actual quarters. Hindsight is not allowed.

QUARTER ONE

• A bit surprised to see D’Andre Swift at the starting tailback position to start the game. Not because of his performance but because of the Roschon Johnson media buzz all week.
• 3rd and 4 on first offensive drive. Perfectly called out to Cole Kmet and Rome Odunze blows the block. The play was not only going to be a first down, but it was also going to be a massive gain. The story of this early season hasn’t been scheme, in my mind. It’s been execution.
• 3rd and 5 on first defensive drive. Bears blitz and don’t get home. This is a very good defense but what will keep them from being elite is their inability to harass quarterbacks on pivotal third downs.
• Mark Sanchez does something analysts shouldn’t do, and that’s trying to make broad points on every single down. Some plays are just plays.
• Gervon Dexter Sr. is one hell of a player. When you have a pass rushing force in the middle of your defensive line, it allows so much creativity elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if the Bears start moving him around to create mismatches and complement Sweat.
• I’ve tweeted this a number of times, but I still don’t understand what this new kickoff rule is trying to achieve. Do they want more returns? Why would this increase returns? I just want to understand the logic.
• The “blindside block” rule…what is Braxton Jones supposed to do on that play? He’s directly next to the man. How long does he have to wait?
• Second offensive drive worse than the first. 1st and 25 is manageable, but not when you’re running up the gut on first down. This is the modern NFL, folks. The Bears have to be willing to chuck it down the field on early downs and this coaching staff continues to coach afraid.
• Tory Taylor makes my heart sing. What a weapon.
• Stafford gets Chris Williams to do the unthinkable and jump offsides. Another individual mistake. And fairly or unfairly, that kind of mistake falls on the head coach.

Score: Bears 0, Rams 3.

QUARTER TWO

• Stafford hits Tutu or an easy downfield completion on first down and the Bears commit another idiotic penalty. This time it is Brisker with a late hit.
• There’s a timeout! Where? On the field! Ohhhhhhh…
• Brisker was clearly out of bounds before the reversed interception. Here’s my question: why? Why does this team seem to be completely lacking in awareness through the first month of the season?
• Carter catches kickoff about a foot into the end zone. He still doesn’t return it. I’m so confused by the whole rule change.
• Bears run the ball on first down. Drink.

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Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears This Week?

I.

Always.

Like.

THE.

Chicago.

Bears.

Time to Get Things Sorted

The Rams are 29th in passing yards allowed per game through three weeks. They have only four sacks, while allowing seven passing touchdowns. Opposing quarterbacks are tossing to a rate of 127.3, ranking them next to last in the league. Line ’em up, spread ’em out, chuck it.

(They are also a bad rush defense, but does that matter?)

There is a grace period in the NFL, when teams are allowed to look messy and disjointed. Bill Simmons and Cousin Sal, hosts of my favorite NFL podcast, joked that while we the NFL fans were ready for this season, the NFL season was not ready for us. But that grace period usually ends after the first four weeks. The Bears have looked solid and prepared on defense, incoherent and unprepared on offense.

They don’t have to light the Rams up for 40 Sunday, but the non-rookies need to start producing.

Lumet III: Theatrical Roots/Theatrical Cinema

Let’s start linking these units together. We discussed Lumet’s ideological foundations with The Group Theater, and his development of early television aesthetics. So, it’s unsurprising that Lumet’s cinematic career, at least at the early stages, is peppered with stage adaptations.

Stage Struck (1958), his second film, is based on the play Morning Glory. But it’s a light comedy and produces light fare. Lumet quickly understands the in order to bring the stage to the screen, and achieve his sensibility, he has to bring the stage’s heavyweights to the screen. And while he’ll make some script alterations here and there, he’s loyal to the power of the text. (This will be discussed later in the term as one of the reasons Lumet is not a favorite of the auteur theory folks.)

Who are these heavyweights? Tennessee Williams. Arthur Miller. Eugene O’Neill. The three most important American dramatists of the first half of the 20th century. In 1960, Lumet adapted Williams’ Orpheus Descending as The Fugitive Kind, starring Marlon Brando. The film is a strange one, but worth seeing as an example of the dramatic hurdles one faces when bringing the stage to the screen. Lumet’s adaptation of Miller’s A View From the Bridge is far more straightforward, but a rather bland cinematic effort.

It is with Long Day’s Journey into Night that Lumet finds his theatrically adaptive form. It is a beautiful film and an exquisite piece of cinematic craftsmanship. From Film at Lincoln Center:

The definitive Eugene O’Neill on film, Lumet’s flawless adaptation of the author’s autobiographical, Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece stars Ralph Richardson as the embittered stage actor James Tyrone, husband to a recovering (or relapsing?) morphine addict (Oscar-nominee Katharine Helpburn) and father to an alcoholic fellow actor (Jason Robards Jr., recreating his role from the original Broadway production) and a tubercular merchant seaman (Dean Stockwell). Shot entirely in sequence at New York’s Chelsea Studios following a lengthy rehearsal period with the cast, Long Day’s Journey swept the acting prizes of the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, winning a collective Best Actor trophy for Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell, and Best Actress for Hepburn.

“After such an experience, I don’t see how one can niggle over whether it’s ‘cinema’ or merely ‘filmed theatre.’ Whatever it is, it’s great…Katharine Hepburn has surpassed herself—the most beautiful comedienne of the thirties and forties has become our greatest tragedienne; seeing her transitions in Journey, the way she can look eighteen or eighty at will, experiencing the magic in the art of acting, once can understand why the appellation ‘the divine’ has sometimes been awarded to certain actresses.”
—Pauline Kael

Lumet always felt he didn’t get enough credit for the cinema of this adaptation. I think anyone revisiting it now understands his displeasure was well-founded.

Here is my favorite speech from the piece. Watch the subtlety of Lumet’s camera, and the effectiveness of the lighting design, in allowing Dean Stockwell, as Edmund, to tell this story.

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Rams, nothing but sheep. 

Yet this will not be their field.

Bears call this one home.

Tomorrow: Week 4 game preview!

The league makes little sense through three weeks. Let’s discuss.

• Can’t imagine how popular Dave Canales is right now in that Panthers locker room. He made one of the most difficult decisions for a young coach to make and changed the fortunes of the 2024 Panthers. Andy Dalton isn’t the future, they know that, but players want to win, and those players knew why they weren’t winning.
• Brian Callahan can say anything he wants, but there is no way the Titans locker room isn’t frustrated with Will Levis losing them games. And he is overtly losing them games with some of the worst decision making we’ve seen at the position. Could Mason Rudolph be any worse?
• Week 3 Saints is why you don’t overrate anything that happens in the NFL before Halloween. The league’s two-week juggernaut looked like what many of us expected in 2024.
• The Niners just aren’t the same team when they don’t have their stars. Good roster. Good coaching. But McCaffrey, Deebo, Trent are what make them a uniquely difficult matchup. Without all three of those guys, they become somewhat ordinary.
• Miami can’t compete with these quarterbacks.
• How can the Steelers even be considering going back to Russell Wilson? Fields fits that structure perfectly.
• Baltimore at Dallas was a microcosm of those two organizations currently. The latter never show up for a big game. The former can’t hold a lead anymore. Is either a title contender? I don’t think so.
• Josh Allen is going to be the runaway MVP if he stays healthy.

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I picked the 2024 Chicago Bears to win eleven games.

Spoiler alert: the 2024 Chicago Bears are not likely to win eleven games.

That is not to say this cannot be a good season, or even a very good season. It can. The Bears have a defense that will keep them in every single game; they have been borderline incoherent offensively through three weeks and are still a play or two away from being 3-0. Teams in this league are separated by inches, not yards, and the Bears will be improving incrementally as the campaign continues. They can absolutely still be playing relevant football deep into December and competing for one of those wildcard spots.

But there were a few “givens” heading into this season that have not materialized, namely the team’s ability to run the ball and consistently stop the run. The latter is less of a concern. Defenses face undeserved scrutiny when their offenses don’t score enough points. The former, however, is a five-alarm fire. Why can’t they run the ball? Sure, the Bears currently have liabilities at center and right guard, but they also had those liabilities in 2023. The other three starting offensive linemen are exactly the same, but Darnell Wright, Teven Jenkins and Braxton Jones are all performing way below expectations. Is it a performance issue? Is it opposing scheme? Is it simply a group struggling to implement a new system? Hello? Can anyone hear me?

And it seems the Bears themselves have been shocked by this development. You don’t call four runs, including an insane college option on 4th and goal at the one, unless you think you’re a running team. After Sunday in Indy, the Bears are now hopefully well aware of their changed identity. They can’t run the ball. But it seems they sure can toss it around.

This season is all about Caleb Williams and that running game was the primary reason many of us believed he’d have one of the easiest transitions to the NFL in years. Without it, we see games like Sunday, games where he’s being asked to throw the football more than 50 times. And what we saw in Indianapolis was Caleb doing the things supremely talented rookies do when they’re asked to throw the football that much, preparing a pigskin paella of electric moments, befuddling errors, and plenty of flavors that leave us wanting to come back for more. This is likely to be a very good season because of Caleb, who now projects to throw for more 3,500 yards in his rookie campaign. But the hope was he’d be a complementary asset as a rookie and that hope is quickly dwindling as the Bears sit 30th in the league in rushing.

It is still early. My 11-win prediction broke down as 4-2 in NFC North, 2-2 splits with the NFC West and AFC south, and a sweep of the three last place opponents, New England, Carolina, and Washington. I’m not ready to dramatically alter that, with the exception of Minnesota and Sam Darnold looking way better than I had expected. The Bears have three more games before the bye, and that bye week will be their next opportunity to make wholesale changes with personnel and scheme. If they can be 3-3 heading into that break, the season is still right in front of them.

But if the team doesn’t solve their problems in the run game, they’re going to be asking an awful lot from their rookie quarterback. That’ll be a lot of fun to watch, but it also requires slight alterations of seasonal expectations. Asking a rookie quarterback to win you eleven without help is asking too much.

Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears this Week?

I.

Always.

Like.

THE.

Chicago.

Bears.

Notes on the Indianapolis Colts

• The Colts are allowing 237 yards per game on the ground through two weeks, and ironically have found themselves in two very close ballgames. If the Bears are going to find their rushing legs in the early part of this season, it is going to happen Sunday.
• The Indy media is on the assault, and thankfully some of that criticism is being levied at their GM, Chris Ballard. Ballard has been playing the sports media for a decade, leaking more than any other personnel man in the league, and receiving unwarranted kudos for mediocrity as a result. Said a friend (in the league) to me, “I like just about everybody, but I don’t trust Ballard.”
• Colts took injury hits to their defense, as well, including DeForest Buckner.
• It is not a stat to which many point but opposing passer rating does tell a story and Colts’ opponents through two weeks are pitching to 120.7 rating. Only three teams are worse: the league’s worst team (Carolina), the league’s worst defense (Washington), and a team Kyler Murray just publicly embarrassed (Los Angeles).

Lumet II: Early TV Aesthetics and 12 Angry Men

Sidney Lumet is not a cinematic stylist; there is no signature, visual aesthetic attributable to his work. His camera is a collaborator in service of the story. This is one of the reasons he has not received proper consideration.

But to understand Lumet’s technique, per se, one must understand where he began as a director: live television. Throughout the early 50s, Lumet directed hundreds of live specials for shows like Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theater. These had minimal sets (often one), small budgets and tight production schedules. Lumet learned the craft of filmmaking – camera movement, lighting, handling actors – in what amounted to a cinematic bootcamp.

How does one show this? Lumet does it brilliantly in his must-read book, Making Movies:

12 Angry Men, Boris Kaufman, photographer. It never occurred to me that shooting an entire picture in one room was a problem. In fact, I felt I could turn it into an advantage. One of the most important dramatic elements for me was the sense of entrapment those men must have felt in that room. Immediately, a “lens plot” occurred to me. As the picture unfolded, I wanted the room to seem smaller and smaller. That means that I would slowly shift to longer lenses as the picture continued. Starting with the normal range (28mm to 40mm), we progressed to 50mm, 75mm, and 100mm lenses. (p. 81)

When you watch 12 Angry Men, pay close attention to what we in the sports world might call “the thirteen man” – the camera. (The film is available to stream everywhere but it’s free on Roku Channel and with your MGM+ and Criterion subscriptions.)

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