'For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign' Inspires Hope

Congress can either move at a glacial pace or a lightning one. Luckily for Brian Wallach, he's worked in the White House as a Lawyer, so he knows how to get things done. For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign is a film I saw and reviewed about a year and a half ago. At that time, I gave the film a perfect score. It was refreshing to see an incredibly hopeful documentary. Most docs make you feel painfully at a loss, not with this film. Director Christopher Burke presents a solution to a major problem.

On a standard Doctor's Visit, Brian Wallach is diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Once diagnosed with ALS, most patients have about six months to live. Brian Wallach, however, is no ordinary person. He runs the I AM ALS organization https://www.iamals.org/ that works on developing treatments and a cure when there doesn't seem to be any for patients of ALS. We find out early in the film that when Brian was given his death sentence, Doctors had no treatment for ALS. It's just a solum: eat whatever you like, and live your life before your time's up.

By turning despair into action, Brian continues to race against his own biological clock. How much is actually accomplished in the film is staggering. I AM ALS has become an organization that raises eighty-five million dollars per year. What a pharmaceutical pill can solve is no long a mystery. Furthermore, experimental treatments have become something that can be used if you're a victim of ALS. It's a miracle what is possible, all with the help of a massive forward momentum organization.

With all this positivity, I hate to come in as the curmudgeon film critic pointing out the film's flaws. But it is my job to point out what's flawed if there is anything. With ninety-nine percent of movies having a problem, there's one major one to point out here. The film feels like a campaign commercial. It's probably because it is one. The picture makes no secret in revealing that it's a campaign, as the film's original title is No Ordinary Campaign. The only thing that's ordinary in this film is its eye-rolling musical montages.

It might be because I'm in my later thirties, and my brain can't adjust to modern music. I can't stand that goofy boy band, positive vibe sound. It's that part of the song where lyrics aren't used, but vocals singing, "Ohh, ahhh, ohh, ahhh." It's the same kind of sound you hear in a pill or car commercial. To really narrow it down, it sounds like the final song in Bill & Ted Face the Music. What is that corny-sounding nonsense? Get off my lawn!

Just for that annoying bit of ear-tearing noise, I take my original four out of four stars down a peg to three and a half out of four. I get the film is meant to lift spirits and appeal to all generations, but the score left me cringing when I should have been cheering. It's a minor complaint for a film that's meant to be as commercial as possible. The film makes some incredible leaps but isn't without hitting some tree branches on its way down.

For Life & Love: No Ordinary Campaign is available on Amazon Prime now.

If you'd like to read my initial review, you can do so by following this link. https://www.ypareviews.com/blog/2022/10/19/no-ordinary-campaign-inspires-in-a-time-that-needs-inspiration