Misdiagnosed: Reclaiming “Barefoot” from Critical Neglect
Photo by Bart Singer - © 2013 - Barefoot Pictures, LLC I know this is a strange choice to launch a blog about art and culture, a forgotten romantic dramedy from 2014 that critics barely touched and the mental health community seemed to swat away on reflex, like a gnat that got too close to a diagnosis. Barefoot is not a canonical work. It’s not visionary or cult-classic. It's a quiet movie by traditional standards. But it’s where I’m starting. Barefoot , odd, unassuming, and almost accidentally revealing, is part of what drove me to create this space in the first place. This blog wasn’t born out of a need to celebrate prestige. It was born out of frustration at how often cultural works, especially small, fragile, tonally strange ones, get misread, flattened, or dismissed by people who seem not to have experienced them at all. The kind of “critical drive-by” that reduces a film to a logline, a thumbnail, or worse, a hashtag for outrage. I wrote about this in m...