Allen v Farrow

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Good post from @Austruck. Haven’t seen it yet, but, next time I subscribe to HBO I will be watching this.
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...I found it interesting, for example, that more than once Allen complains in public statements that Mia is engaging in nothing more than a smear campaign--and then immediately engages in his own smear campaign about her sanity, her motherhood, and her personality.

Things like that started to add up for me as I continued to watch.
...
I think retaliatory smear campaigns are very much human nature. Just look at how politics works, if one has mud thrown on them and doesn't throw back an equal amount of mud, then one can look guilty as labeled.

So I can't blame Woody for hitting back at Mia (assuming he's innocent and getting mistreated by her). Of course if he's guilty of the accusations he would still throw mud back at Mia. In the end I don't think that's a good metric to decide the issue...But I'm not trying to change your mind Hell I haven't even watched the mini series, nor am I a huge fan of Woody, I'm just typing out my thoughts



I still need to watch episode 4 tonight.

I'm a Woody fan who had repressed my digust with the Soon-Yi stuff a while ago. I was very young when the big court case with him and Farrow took place, so I don't remember any of it.

Pretty sure Woody will be the first director in my life I stop watching. I'm genuinely surprised some of you still believe him.

It's stomach churning.

Amendment: I was thinking '81 not '91. I wasn't too young, but apparently I didn't give a flip.
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That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
Misread the title and wondered, "How on earth could someone compare Alien with Mia Farrow?" Had to share how much of an idiot I can be at times. More than I'd like to remember.
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matt72582's Avatar
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Misread the title and wondered, "How on earth could someone compare Alien with Mia Farrow?" Had to share how much of an idiot I can be at times. More than I'd like to remember.

She looked like an alien in "Rosemary's Baby"



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Moses Farrow's account (there was no train in the crawlspace; Woody was never out of his sight on the day; Mia had been grooming the family to see Woody as a child molester for weeks prior to the incident) is the most compelling evidence to make me question Woody's guilt. And the fact that he was excluded from the doc is the biggest red flag to make me question the integrity of the project.
He wasn't excluded. They stated plainly that he declined to be interviewed.

Also, if you saw through to the end, Moses's statements that you list above were all opposite of what the police themselves noticed/noted/wrote during their investigation that day. They even showed a diagram the police submitted of the layout of the attic and where the train set was.

That sort of stuff is what swayed me toward Woody's guilt: the impartial bits from police, the judge who decided not to prosecute, etc. etc. All seemed fairly compelling to me, with no skin in the game.



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I think retaliatory smear campaigns are very much human nature. Just look at how politics works, if one has mud thrown on them and doesn't throw back an equal amount of mud, then one can look guilty as labeled.

So I can't blame Woody for hitting back at Mia (assuming he's innocent and getting mistreated by her). Of course if he's guilty of the accusations he would still throw mud back at Mia. In the end I don't think that's a good metric to decide the issue...But I'm not trying to change your mind Hell I haven't even watched the mini series, nor am I a huge fan of Woody, I'm just typing out my thoughts
Definitely watch it before further comment. I started out on one side of this and ended up on the other.

Also, that bit about the smear campaigns was more of an "aside" for me. NOT really swaying my thoughts. Of course BOTH Mia and Woody would say the very same sorts of things no matter which one of them was, in fact, telling the truth. It is, indeed, human nature, as I know all too well.



He wasn't excluded. They stated plainly that he declined to be interviewed.
Moses was excluded in that his publicly available testimony was not included, something that wouldn't have required his direct participation for the filmmakers to address. This omission, and others, are what ultimately put the filmmakers' credibility in question. (The train issue is addressed here, via nanny Kristie Groteke.)


This review which is otherwise pro-Farrow also criticizes its one-sidedness precisely because it damages the credibility of its narrative. Allen's guilt or innocence aside, this appears to be a shoddy piece of advocacy-disguised-as-journalism, and, as such, probably shouldn't be held as the smoking gun some are claiming before these inconsistences and omissions are taken into account.



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Misread the title and wondered, "How on earth could someone compare Alien with Mia Farrow?" Had to share how much of an idiot I can be at times. More than I'd like to remember.
Oh, we know Yn.....we know.....



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Moses was excluded in that his publicly available testimony was not included, something that wouldn't have required his direct participation for the filmmakers to address. This omission, and others, are what ultimately put the filmmakers' credibility in question. (The train issue is addressed here, via nanny Kristie Groteke.)


This review which is otherwise pro-Farrow also criticizes its one-sidedness precisely because it damages the credibility of its narrative. Allen's guilt or innocence aside, this appears to be a shoddy piece of advocacy-disguised-as-journalism, and, as such, probably shouldn't be held as the smoking gun some are claiming before these inconsistences and omissions are taken into account.
Thanks for these links. I read them all... because I do want to use as much information as possible to form an opinion. I won't go into details about why some of what Mia and Dylan (and even Woody) said (and how they said it) inform my opinions, but let's just say that family and custody issues have a certain smell about them that can make one's olfactory senses about these things a little more focused and pronounced.

I appreciated the other sides of this issue in the links you provided. I will say that I knew through all four episodes that the documentary was going to be one-sided in most of its approach. You can tell that right from the beginning (read my first posts in this thread for my initial reactions). Once one side isn't even participating, you're not going to be able to do a balanced documentary.

But there was a lot of new information in this for me. I was busy with babies and my own life falling apart around this same time period, so I learned most of the details and most of Dylan's story through this documentary. Did she come off as a little bit self-centered? Sure. No question. But did I ultimately believe that she experienced these things? Yes, I still do. And if that's the only true thing I pull out of those four hours of television, that's the only thing that matters. The rest is just window dressing and radio noise. If it happened, then he's guilty. If it didn't, then he's not.

I still think it happened. I don't like it (Love and Death and Sleeper were two of my favorite movies for many years after they first came out), but I believe it happened.

And that doesn't make me happy.



I appreciated the other sides of this issue in the links you provided. I will say that I knew through all four episodes that the documentary was going to be one-sided in most of its approach. You can tell that right from the beginning (read my first posts in this thread for my initial reactions). Once one side isn't even participating, you're not going to be able to do a balanced documentary.
The "balance" aspect is my primary interest. I'm not concerned with trying to defend Woody Allen or persuade anyone of his innocence. I'm much more concerned with defending basic journalistic standards. As you say, the filmmakers' agenda is fairly clear from the onset, so I take issue with their characterization of their series as "complete", "thorough" and "balanced". Even those who believe Dylan can't believe these descriptions of this doc. As a rule of thumb this puts the filmmakers' motives in doubt for me personally. And, if you do happen to believe Dylan's charges, this preliminary dishonesty ultimately makes it harder for her to receive justice.

Another example I've seen is, in response to a tweet from Alec Baldwin (a blow-hard that I have no interest in defending here), the filmmakers' noting how it was Woody Allen, not Mia, that originally went public with the story. That's disingenuos. If we accept the fact of the alleged abuse, what difference does it make? Which party was the first to go public has no bearing whatsoever on the facts of the case. In fact, it only runs directly into the quote from Mia's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, that Woody could have avoided the publicity if he had only accepted Mia's settlement offer. That raises a lot more ethical quandries than it puts to rest. It's a bizarre thing for them to use as a defense, suggesting that Woody's going public (refusing the private settlement) is what got him into this mess rather than the abuse itself.

I can name a number of documentaries which promote policies and causes I support but which engage in such disingenuous ethics and manipulation that makes them hurt the integrity of the cause more than it helps. A documentary can be effectively powerful but still present a frame of the facts which is misleading. There's been enough evidence to show that this particular doc is troubling in what it ignored out of convenience of its preferred narrative.



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She did not. She was beautiful in this movie.

Did you NOT see the baby? I kept calling him/her Mia Jr.
That bond (and resemblance) between mother and child is so close.
But in all seriousness, I find your avatar more beautiful than Mia ever was, and I'm not even English - just affected



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
This seems like something you've said several times before (whether a joke or not), but we never see the baby.
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@Jinnistan, all your points are good ones. And I agree with your assessment of this "documentary" in those regards.

I watched this mostly to learn what I could (since I knew little about this case's particulars). I wasn't interested enough to start digging on my own, so the lazy side of me figured I'd let HBO hand me a bunch of information. Sure, it's Farrow-leaning. Most documentaries seem to be one-sided these days. (Not excusing any of them--just pointing it out.) Making a Murderer is a good example. As is Murder Among the Mormons, and many others.

Others seem better: the Manhunt series, the McMillions series, to name two, seemed more like they were telling us a story based on evidences and facts (and the Murder Among the Mormons doc wasn't TOO bad but had its moments).

I guess the difference is that too many documentaries no longer seem to care if they present one side over another. Gone are the initial days of creative nonfiction such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. We're way beyond that now, and the main idea is now to entertain and play up anything sensationalistic. And that's unfortunate.

I did try to sift through the one-sidedness of this four-part doc, though, as I watched. I felt half of Dylan's screen time was unnecessary, but was there mostly to lend sympathy to her side of things. I really didn't like the scene in the last episode where her jaw is shaking and she keeps mentioning it. I understand why they included it, given their bias, but I still didn't like it (despite siding with her story in general). It felt so obviously manipulative.

If the filmmakers were simply trying to tell Dylan's story for her, they could have done that and kept their bias and categorized this series as something else other than a documentary. You know, a fight for the underdog, or telling the story of the oppressed, or something similar. That'd leave them more on the same turf as Making a Murderer (and maybe Tiger King? ha!).

I also appreciate the distinction between Allen's one-off situation versus Weinstein/Epstein/Cosby/Jackson and their ongoing lifestyles. But having said that, if the Allen accusation is true, then he does need to experience some sort of fallout from it and, frankly, has seen very little of it throughout the past two-plus decades... until very very recently. And if he is guilty, then I'm glad he's finally seeing some sort of punishment.

If he's innocent, I have a feeling we'll never know that since both Mia and Dylan have been telling the same story for decades.



I'll try not to say too much as I can be inflammatory and abrasive. I stand with the Farrows.

I believe them. It is very difficult for a woman in America to prove that a man raped her. It is even more difficult for a mother to prove that her husband is molesting their children.
I'll close with this. I really hate that I live in a country that can cancel pepe le pew but still pretend that a man that started banging his 17 year old step daughter and then marrying her a few years later to make it "ok" somehow... Couldn't in turn rape and or molest 7 year old Dillon? That kind of thinking makes me wanna blow my brains out. Sorry. I probably said too much. Sigh...
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