Anyone who’s seen How to with John Wilson, HBO’s short-lived jewel of a documentary series, knows that its laconic episode titles — “How to Make Small Talk,” “How to Appreciate Wine,” and so on — undersold its complexity. Narrated and hosted by the titular filmmaker, the majority New York City-set show represented the Kermit-voiced Wilson’s POV with a mundanely surreal mosaic of street scenes and sometimes extended side quests accompanied by one-of-a-kind human subjects. Totally filmed by Wilson in the first person, everything always came together to not quite answer the prompt posed by a given episode’s title but meditate on it with wry hilarity and unassuming profundity. (Its crowning achievement might be “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto,” the especially inward-looking season-one finale that tussles with nicotine addiction, the creeping-in pandemic, and Wilson’s grandmotherly relationship with his elderly Italian landlady, whom he affectionately calls “mama.”) Wilson’s style is funny in a way that can cause a giggle fit. But it never strikes me as mean-spirited the way How to co-executive producer Nathan Fielder’s own body of work — whose sensibility Wilson’s own has been likened to — can be. I’ve always seen it collectively as both genuinely curious about and appreciative of even the strangest human idiosyncrasies. The closest it comes to critical contempt is reserved for the powerful people and systems who threaten the well-being of those with far less.
I’m neither the first nor last person to think of Wilson’s first feature-length project, The History of Concrete, essentially as an extended episode of How to. It even begins with the same words many an installment commenced with — “Hey, New York” — only they’re this time seen on a sign rather than froggily uttered. Wilson does, as always, attempt to investigate what the title suggests he will. In Concrete, Wilson will go on a surprisingly packed and enthusiasm-filled convention celebrating the bumpy gray substance; take a car tour down the U.S.’s oldest street made of the stuff; pad around Italy to ask amusingly button-lipped construction workers why eons-old concrete holds up better than more recent formulae; and more.
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Image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
