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Strung Out

Writer's picture: Blade RobinsonBlade Robinson

Updated: Jul 21, 2024

These Polish writers and producers, I have found, give us downright heavy, emotionally taxing, and wrenching motif's that send your emotional spectrum into the absolute depth of its abyss.

It's tough to find the cinematic productions, that are truly entertaining, that truly grab you, that either wrench your guts out, or make you want to entirely redesign your whole life, around what you just watched.


The ones that stand out. Here's one.


Ask yourself this:


How many movies have you watched? Is the answer in the hundreds, or the thousands. For me, it's probably somewhere around a thousand. How many have stood out?


Maybe twenty.


Most movies are fine and good, they serve their purpose, which is escaping for an hour and forty minutes from the tough life we all have. Even the bad ones are good because I personally enjoy the amusement of watching a movie that is really not good.


Look, bad movies are entertaining in their own rite.


In my recent quarantine in the bedroom at home I call the hospital room, due to where I end up after each hospital procedure I have endured in the last three years, as I recover with my fluids and pill bottles, I found one on HBO's MAX called "The Thaw".


Blade Life Blog
The Thaw

It's bound to be a heavy one because it's Polish. These Polish writers and producers, I have found, give us downright heavy, emotionally taxing, and wrenching motif's that send your emotional spectrum into the absolute depth of its abyss.


Just what I look for in a movie or series. At its end, I was completely strung out.


Exactly what I was looking for. Depressing and gut-wrenching mixed with harrowing shock and awe is entertaining. Part of that is why people like horror movies. Some people like happy, light fluff, I do too, but rarely.


Give me the heavy stuff.


"The Thaw" is a murder mystery series set in Poland and its main character is Katarzyna Wajda, the lead detective in the standard themed murder mystery format of the hard-nosed chief of police, Wajda's difficult detective partner, doubters of her work all around, and plenty of mysterious twists and turns. Just what you'd expect.


The Thaw with Katarzyna Wajda Blade Life Blog-Strung Out
Katarzyna Wajda in The Thaw

Ok, so a young pregnant woman is murdered, and the newborn child is nowhere to be found.

Fascinating murder headline?


No.


But man oh man, it's the journey and the twists that are fascinating. "The Thaw" has managed to get me to not want to find out who did it and why, because I love the journey so much. The thing is two-fold, one in that, Wajda is so dammit beautiful, it's entertaining already. She is so intense, so captivating, so sexy, so real, so engaging, so smart, so intuitive, an outright superstar human being.


The second fold is that you find yourself guessing what's next and many times you're right, which is very rewarding. It's not over-complicated but the twists take you just where you want them to take you.


And that Wajda.


But I often get so lost in twist and turns movies, I am not very smart, so if you make one that I understand perfectly, you, the producers, have done a MAGNIFICENT job of a series or movie that has not been over-produced and over-thought, like many are, that appeals to everyone.


Productions that are complicated, yet everyone can follow, riveted throughout, are incredibly difficult tasks to achieve. As a writer/producer, I would think that is the goal.


And when you have a Wajda...


And your Trepa and your Pietrzak, and your Strzelecki...and the incredible Kosinski.


I love you Poland through your writers and your cinematic productions, through your tragedy of the second world war, and through that, your love of your beloved Poland. The love of your country through film is profoundly illuminating. Your language is the most beautiful and soothing on our planet.


All strung Out - The Thaw
The Incredible Sebastian Fabijanski

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