Review of Enlighten Up! (2008) by Josh G — 27 Feb 2010

Enlighten Up! is one female documentarian's attempt to seduce a hipster New Yorker thru her camera. She fails.

Kate Churchill, who has been doing yoga about as long as I have, drags her boyfriend(?) to half the yoga studios in New York, intent on finding the right instructor with whom her sole subject, Nick, will click. Apparently, she wants to be there, camera at the ready, when Nick receives something akin to enlightenment. (I guess she missed the part about enlightenment generally taking a lifetime to achieve?).

My biggest problem with the film is her subject, Nick, who apparently would rather be knocking back PBRs in a dark bar in Williamsburg. He starts out as simply the Voice of Skepticism but turns into Mr. Super Whiny somewhere over the Pacific. In fact, Nick's grating passive-aggressiveness doesn't kick in until AFTER Churchill's hauled him all the way to India to meet some of the stars of the yoga world. Not into yoga? Gee, Nick why didn't you just say 'no' in the first place? Maybe because you knew this docu gig would include all-expenses excursions to Hawaii, Los Angeles and all over India. And it comes with two-hours of Nick's tiresome self-deprecation in front of a hand-held.

He was right about one thing: this film would have been far more 'enlightening' had it just been Churchill chronicling her own immersion in a world and spiritualism we Westerners still know so little about.