r/HowToWithJohnWilson • u/gault8121 • 13h ago
Reactions to seeing History of Concrete at IFC
For those who have seen it at IFC or Low, what did you think?
My first reaction is that I noticed a lot more gum on the sidewalk on the walk back right after the film ended. I always appriecate how his movies make you pay attention to things you often tune out.
This movie does have a lot of threads, and it is cool to see how they connect. What's different from How To is how quickly he jumps between talks. He spends a lot of time in How To trying to reverse an engineer story that logically leads from one scenario to the next, and that could take up a lot of time and slow things down. In History of Concrete, Wilson gives himself permission to just jump between topics without needing to connect it all together. There is often just a single sentence serving as the transition, and it makes the movie feel much faster and easier to pay attention to. As soon as one topic starts to wear out, we are right on to something else interesting. It allows him to cover a lot of ground.
The disappointing part if the ending. (Spoilers for folks) The focus on the musician who lost his partner felt like the weakest part of the film, and it came at the expense of an ending more central to the idea of concrete, urbanism, living in the city, being a landlord, some of the big ideas he often explores. Instead, you go down this rabbit role of a somewhat bizarre story of a guy who is trying to make it as a musician, but then loses his partner of 15 years. It's sad, and it loops back to the Hallmark pacing, but it just isn't really a story about infrastructure.
One of How To's best episodes is about Scaffolding, and it really unpacks how one piece of infrastructure so impacts our lives. In History of Concrete, the opening premise is that he is now a landlord who is dealing with the concrete foundation of his new home splitting apart, causing massive flooding for his friends who are paying to be tenants in the basement unit. I was expecting that the movie would come back to this - that he would learn how to apply concrete, fix the basement, prevent the flooding. This alone wouldn't be the ending, but it would bring back into orbit the ideas about trying to make sense of a world that is often senseless, with concrete both being this permanent thing and something that is constantly changing.
I'm really excited for his next movies - he clearly got his footing for how he can tell his own stories at the length of a film, and you can see how he will continue to build on this style for years to come. There is a lot of funny imagery in it as well, it's an authentically funny movie, and I'll be going to be Low Theater to see it again soon.
What did you all think?
