Having only been semi familiar with How to With John Wilson, a movie that Wilson directs about the history of concrete had me puzzled as a concept similarly to the zoom calls he features in the movie itself, but there was just something so profoundly engaging and interesting about what he manages to convey and do with this documentary on literally the history of concrete but to an obscure degree. There is something so engaging, fascinating, and intensely confusing about what inspired Wilson to make a documentary on the history of concrete, and I’m not entirely sure what I learned about said history, but rather a transfixion on its existence as a whole – even though it’s nearly as common as grass or water in the city – but Wilson managed to do something no one thought possible – make something so deeply fascinating about something so incredibly mundane and uninteresting as concrete.
How does one make 101 minutes discussing the conceptualization of pitching a documentary on the creation and history of concrete so deeply moving, interesting, and engaged with inside baseball ideology? Well John Wilson somehow snuck a camera into a pitch meeting on how to create a Hallmark movie (which is one of the funniest bits of the movie that literally says “you get bonus points for dead relatives” as a selling point to make your movie of the week stand out in an already crowded genre, and transposes those ideas that he has learned from creating Hallmark movies, to create and pitch a documentary about concrete. It’s bewildering, ingenious, and simply cannot move your eyes away. You get lost in the simplicity and brilliance of the idea and concept that learning about concrete, its place in society, its overwhelming abuse, and how we take it for granted and ignore signs we shouldn’t ignore is simply put fascinating.
There truly is not a way to describe The History of Concrete that makes any sense, because in theory it shouldn’t. There should not be 101 minutes on cleaning, preserving, protecting, and getting peoples thoughts on concrete anywhere from New York to the supposed first concrete laying in Italy – it just doesn’t make sense how this is fascinating but Wilson does it in such a way that we cannot stop and be transfixed on every word he says and every level of information presented to us. Something as simplistic as cleaning the sidewalks people use on a daily bases, turns into a hilarious moment in the film, that genuinely shouldn’t be funny, but between Wilson and the business leader he meets with to ‘bust’ the gum off the sidewalk, it’s hard not to find whimsy and hilarity in the moment.
The History of Concrete should work as a Funny or Die or be a musical number on Saturday Night Live written by John Mulaney, but expanding this concept and fleshing it out for 101 minutes should not work. Thankfully though, John Wilson manages to bring his cadence and simplicity of presenting facts and how to guides to create something so infectiously entertaining and engaging, that it just flies by and creates something so transcendent and brilliant is in impossible not to be charmed by the sheer tenacity and mundaneness of something we effortlessly take advantage of but should truly appreciate more for what it is – a underlying support for society as we know it. Next we’ll see John Wilson explain to us the importance and creation of a phone book, and we’ll still simply somehow be just as transfixed and mesmerized about that as we became about the history of concrete.
