Okay, so Episode 3 is the strongest of the three hours shown so far, (though still in my view not very good) after Episode 2 last week, which was by far the weakest (and again I so agree with the point made by others that the bloat in the documentary is atrocious).
The heart of any argument that the evidence is clear that Allen molested Dylan has to be in explaining why the official investigations into the allegations did not find them convincing. Episode 3 engages these issues, and raised some valid questions (e.g, why did the Yale Child Sexual Abuse Clinic destroy their notes? Why did they interview a 7 year old child so frequently?). Unfortunately the documentary is again not transparent or complete in its discussion of these issues. They have a couple of experts say that notes are never destroyed in a forensic assessment like this, but neglect to report that in the early 1990s it was not just common professional practice, but state law, to destroy notes after a determination was made that alleged abuse had not occurred. I agree that frequent interviews of young children are poor practice, but the doc does not say (and, having read the summary of the Yale Clinic’s findings, I still do not know) how long each of these interviews were, or how many of them covered the same ground. The documentary also fails to point out that the video Mia made of her daughter prior to taking her for formal evaluation was itself composed of many sessions, with the camera turned off and on repeatedly. I have been thinking that if the Doc had any chance to justify itself, it would be in presenting new evidence to show malfeasance in the CT and NY investigations, but there is nothing new here, mostly warmed over (often directly quoted) allegations from long time Allen critics like Maureen Orth. I also thought there might be reports that Mia was alleging multiple incidents of abuse, but so far the focus is on those missing 20 minutes allegedly in the attic. It’s not impossible that Woody Allen is a single incident child molestor, but that is hardly the typical pattern. Dylan was examined by physicians and even her mother acknowledges no physical evidence of sexual abuse was ever found; this does not rule out many kinds of sexual abuse, but again there is no evidence here that abuse occurred. The long section of Ep 3 that is Allen critics annotating the custody trial and outcome is of no bearing on the central issues. As the doc point out, it is common for fathers accused of abuse to sue for custody (sometimes vindictive punishment by psychopaths, other times genuine and heartsick attempts to rescue children from toxic envionrments), but in my experience even conventional fathers most often do not win, and putting child abuse allegations to the side, Woody Allen is hardly a conventional father. Maybe episode 4 will bring something new (one would think they would try to end with a bombshell - and they hint at some explosive explanation why the CT DA did not file charges at the end of Ep 3) but after 3 bloated hours there is nothing substantively added to what was previously known about this case. On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 at 7:05 AM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote: > She stole my line...except, that is pretty much the only thing to say > about this case, at least if you want to bend over backwards to be fair to > Mia and Dylan. > > Freeman appears to have seen all four episodes in the last couple of > weeks, after saying when episode 1 aired that she hadn’t seen it at all. If > she’s right then the series is worse than I assumed, in that it never > addresses most of the contrary evidence. > > The filmmakers have been saying in the media that their documentary does > not need to be balanced, because Woody’s version has for 25 years been > dominant, and they are bringing balance by supplying Maia and Dylan’s > version. I’m not convinced there was ever a time that this was true - Allen > has said relatively little over the years, and a search of Twitter will > show that most people expressing an opinion about this assume “Woody Allen > married his step daughter and molested his own child; WHY ISN'T HE IN JAIL?” > > I have been reluctant to bring this next point up, because it is ugly and > has the effect of undermining Mia Farrow’s version even though as far as I > know she has no connection to it. As I have been reading Twitter comments > on this story I have been surprised at a steady stream of both latent and > manifest antisemitism animating much of the anti Woody posts. (Raising this > of course risks enacting a central trope from Annie Hall, but then I always > preferred that to Manhattan). > > I’m not saying that anyone who believe the worst about Allen must be > suspected of being an antisemite, but it does seem that, far more than with > Harvey Weinstein (or Matt Lauer, though perhaps that is more > understandable), Allen’s Jewishness is referenced in some way by a > surprisingly large fraction of his detractors. I suppose that is due in > large part to Allen making his Jewishness a big part of some of his films, > and that for many Americans he has been their most influential exposure to > Judaism. The ugly sense I get though is that for some, the molestation > charges, even with relatively low levels of validity, free them up to > basically say: “I always found that weird little Jew to be creepy.” > > My point in bringing that up is to suggest the explanation lies in the > ambiguity surrounding the charges, which allows observers a less > constrained field to project their own biases into the story. > > On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 at 5:12 AM Adam Bowie <a...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote: > >> A key paragraph perhaps considering what @Pgage has been saying: >> >> "Ziering and Dick don’t know what happened between Dylan and her father. >> Neither do I and neither, perhaps, does anyone at this point, as repeated >> retellings take the place of real memory. Braver and better film-makers >> would drill down into how historical truth can change over time, and how >> two people can look at one image and see very different things." >> >> On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 1:09 PM Adam Bowie <a...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote: >> >>> The previously mentioned Hadley Freeman from The Guardian has a decent >>> piece just published on what the documentary makers appear to have to left >>> out: >>> >>> >>> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/03/allen-v-farrow-woody-allen-mia-farrow-documentary-is-pure-pr-why-else-would-it-omit-so-much >>> >> -- > Sent from Gmail Mobile > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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