Has sporadically provocative and amusing moments, but remains poorly synthesized, somewhat unfocused and leaves you feeling underwhelmed and hungry for more enlightenment about yoga and spirituality.
Comment
04/01/09
Enlighten Up! (2009)
56
%
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.
Runtime: 82 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
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... [More]
Reviews for Enlighten Up!
There's a lot of talk about the downward-facing dog in Enlighten Up, a yoga documentary I'm giving the downward-facing thumb.
06/12/09
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.
08/28/09
Weirdly, it's the documentarian who seems to unravel throughout.
08/28/09
The premise ends up muddling a movie that might have been enlightening.
05/08/09
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.
08/27/09
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.
06/12/09
Give director Churchill credit for including her own obstinacy in the movie
07/26/09
As a movie, Enlighten Up! doesn't really go anywhere.
06/05/09
Its director winds up focusing on the least interesting/most predictable tension of them all, that which arises between herself and her handpicked, inflexible star.
04/01/09
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.
06/11/09
Entertaining but superficial tour %u2014it never substantively differentiates the myriad of yoga options breezily presented.
04/01/09
A modest, sublime look at the search for truth
04/20/09
An April Fool's Day release may be more appropriate than the audience expected in this random collection of interviews and experiences on the heart and soul of yoga.
04/06/09
Director Kate Churchill's acknowledged struggles to impose a story on ... six months' worth of documentary footage is not particularly successful...
05/08/09
What Enlighten Up illustrates about the dynamic between filmmaker and subject is even more interesting than what it says about yoga.
06/12/09
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.
05/29/09
Enlighten Up! is a low-key, charming trip.
06/19/09
Enlighten Up! tries to answer yoga's burning question - what came first, downward facing dog or spiritual dogma?
04/03/09
Enlighten Up! is at least occasionally skeptical of the premise that true things might be articulated and disseminated.
04/07/09
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