Director Kate Churchill ends up with a non-story in her feature Enlighten Up! when her subject fails to experience the changes she had been expecting.
Enlighten Up! (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:34
Fresh:19
Rotten:15
Average Rating:6/10
Consensus: Enlighten Up! is a funny, warmhearted documentary that's uneven in spots, but thought-provoking nonetheless.
Theatrical Release:Apr 3, 2009 Limited
Box Office: $227,790
Synopsis:
Kate Churchill is a filmmaker and a dedicated yoga practitioner who insists that yoga can transform anyone. She decides to prove it. Her plan: select a subject, immerse him in yoga and follow him...
Kate Churchill is a filmmaker and a dedicated yoga practitioner who insists that yoga can transform anyone. She decides to prove it. Her plan: select a subject, immerse him in yoga and follow him until he finds a yoga practice that transforms him. Her subject: Nick Rosen a skeptical, 29 year-old journalist living in New York City.
Intrigued by the opportunity to peek behind the curtain of a 5.7 billion dollar “spiritual” industry, Nick signs on to investigate yoga for 6 months. Before he can say OM, he finds himself twisted up like a pretzel, surrounded by celebrity yogis, true believers, kooks, entrepreneurs and a gentle teacher from Brazil who leads his class with his feet behind his head.
The more Nick investigates yoga the more contradictions he discovers, leading him to question whether yoga is anything more than a workout. As Nick searches for concrete facts and discards the lofty spiritual theories of his yoga teachers, he strays further from Kate’s original plan. The two find themselves lost in Northern India, embroiled in a struggle between Kate’s expectations and Nick’s overt rejection of “spirituality.”
They circle the globe talking to mystics, gurus, mad men and saints searching for the true meaning of yoga. Ultimately, both Nick and Kate end up in places they never could have imagined. They don’t find the answers to their questions, they find much more.
--© Official Site
Starring: Nick Rosen
Starring: Nick Rosen
Director: Kate Churchill
Director: Kate Churchill
Story: Khari Streeter, Jonathon Hexner, Kate Churchill
Producer: Kate Churchill
Composer: Krishna Venkatesh
Studio: Balcony Releasing
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Reviews for Enlighten Up!
What's Rosen's dating life got to do with yoga? Nothing really, beyond a director's last-ditch attempt to show dramatic tension in her film before it peters out into inconclusiveness.
Give director Churchill credit for including her own obstinacy in the movie
In the end, both the believer and the skeptic end up less sure of their beliefs than they were when they started. Which must be at least a small step towards true enlightenment, right?
While Enlighten Up! is ultimately just a surface look at yoga, it's still interesting, if not exactly enlightening, to watch the true believer and the jaded New York journo clash their way down the road to, one hopes, some sort of spiritual resolution.
When she inserts herself into the action, she reveals only her own insecurity. It ends up being very enlightening, but probably not in the way Churchill intends.
There's a lot of talk about the downward-facing dog in Enlighten Up, a yoga documentary I'm giving the downward-facing thumb.
What Enlighten Up illustrates about the dynamic between filmmaker and subject is even more interesting than what it says about yoga.
While Enlighten Up! is entertaining and provocative regardless, it’s too bad that Churchill was so focused on whether Rosen was having his preconceptions shattered that she never stopped to consider her own.
This is a peaceful kind of film, not terribly eventful, but I suppose we wouldn’t want a yoga thriller. Relax. Let it happen. Or not.
When Nick encounters B.K.S. Iyengar, the legendary guruji and one of the foremost figures of yoga, Churchill's mostly lightweight film radiates some spiritual light.
Rosen makes a good correlative for all of us who don't doubt that flexibility and fitness are worthy goals but who cringe at some of the quasi-religious babble that seems inextricably bound up with yoga.
Director Kate Churchill's acknowledged struggles to impose a story on ... six months' worth of documentary footage is not particularly successful...
The premise ends up muddling a movie that might have been enlightening.
The breezy title of this engaging documentary suggests that it isn't going to solve the big questions of life, but will at least treat its subject -- yoga in its many forms from the sublime to the utterly absurd -- with humor and an open spirit.
A pleasure in its open-mindedness. If you're up for a safe, light, skeptic's look into the many variations of modern yoga, take a peek.
What elevates the movie is the refusal of Rosen -- a grounded, non-believing pragmatist — to make the conversion to yoga spirituality and bliss that Churchill so wants for him, and for the arc of her documentary.
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