Bears did today exactly what they should be expected to do, at home, against an inferior opponent: they dominated. Both on the field AND on the sidelines, they dominated.
And they’ve got the real deal at QB. Finally.
3-2. Whole season in front of them.
— DaBearsBlog (@dabearsblog) October 6, 2024
Full content tomorrow. Nursing an injury,
Here’s what happens:
Chicago Bears 30, Carolina Panthers 20
I.
Always.
Like.
THE.
Chicago.
Bears.
Something occurred to me while watching Caleb Williams Sunday against the Los Angeles Rams. He doesn’t look, physically, like a rookie. He has pre-snap command at the line of scrimmage, comfortability in the pocket (when one exists), and makes quick decisions.
And when I watched young Josh Allen and Cam Newton, I used to bemoan their inability to take the underneath stuff well into their second seasons. It was hero shot, run the ball, or bust. It only took Caleb four weeks to grasp that essential element of playing quarterback play in this league. Against the Rams, he put the football in the hands of his playmakers and let them make plays. This is an offense that should be nearly impossible to defend underneath.
What’s his signature flaw currently? Same as those two quarterbacks early in their careers: touch passes. He’s all fastball, but the off-speed stuff will come.
Through four games, Caleb is completing 61.7% of his passes (good), for 787 yards (projects to more than 3,300), 3/4 touchdown to interception (expected but needs improvement), and a passer rating of 72 (but trending in the right direction). It’s quickly becoming a respectable rookie season for the kid, and the next two weeks should be opportunities for him to continuation his upward trend.
The Pawnbroker (1965) is the portrait of Sol Nazerman, a Holocaust survivor operating a pawn shop in post-war New York City. As he confronts the memory of his imprisonment, and the murder of his family, he struggles to connect the human beings alive before him, on the streets and the subways of the city. It is a film about memory, and as such, it is wholly reliant on its director (Lumet) and editor (Ralph Rosenblum) collaborating to establish a technical vocabulary to represent not only memories, but the process of remembering when one prefers not to do so.
If you’re interested in reading an extensive essay on this concept, I recommend “The Representation of Trauma and Memory in The Pawnbroker” by Peter Wilshire for Off-Screen. Wilshire brilliantly connects the film’s technique with deeper studies of memory, trauma, PTSD, etc.
Any syllabus constructed around Lumet must include 12 Angry Men as the philosophical foundation of the career that follows. But as we previously discussed that film still feels an extension of his career in theater and live television. The Pawnbroker is Lumet’s first work of pure cinema, his first profound exploration of his Judaism, and his first New York City masterpiece.
Watch the below clip to see how Lumet visualizes memory.
____________________
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.
Score: Bears 0, Rams 3.
QUARTER TWO
I.
Always.
Like.
THE.
Chicago.
Bears.
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.
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.
Tomorrow: Week 4 game preview!
