{"id":909047,"date":"2026-09-25T11:14:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T11:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/909047\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T11:14:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T11:14:13","slug":"the-history-of-concrete-review-john-wilson-adapts-to-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/909047\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The History of Concrete’ review: John Wilson adapts to movies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Across its three-season run on HBO, John Wilson\u2019s funny, observant docuseries-cum-tutorial \u201cHow to With John Wilson\u201d<\/a> played like the urban travelogue a complex metropolis such as New York was meant to inspire. Wilson, an anxiously witty host, turned his adventures (covering furniture, mastering small talk, appreciating wine) into fraught mini-epics of connection, in which one\u2019s laughter invariably betrayed a melancholic grace about our tenuous place in the big crazy world.<\/p>\n

You wouldn\u2019t expect (or want) his movie-directing debut, \u201cThe History of Concrete,\u201d to be any different and it isn\u2019t, beautifully so. A supersizing of the series format, it doesn\u2019t significantly alter the rangy charm of Wilson\u2019s video-captured eccentricities, a sturdy foundation. He was probably destined to find feature-length curiosity in the titular stuff of walkways and structures, the second-most used building material on Earth, since concrete is mundane, ubiquitous and, though seemingly impervious, susceptible to (wise)cracking.<\/p>\n

And yet this gray mixture, majestic when deployed by ancient Romans (there\u2019s a brief trip to Rome that depletes his production budget) but ugly when dominating our daily stroll, is also a way for Wilson to address the mirage of permanence and quest for solidity that is modern life. He feels these anxieties personally as an Emmy-nominated documentarian now without a show and looking for his next project. Wilson wonders if his particular termite art \u2014 treating street B-roll like a hidden archive of absurd humanity \u2014 has a place in the cutthroat film world of today.<\/p>\n

On one end of that storytelling commerce spectrum is what\u2019s communicated in a class Wilson takes on how to write Hallmark TV movies (\u201cTrauma is fine if it ends on a high note,\u201d the instructor cheerfully offers), and at the other, an early Zoom pitch for this very documentary. Note the awkward silence after he gives his team the proposed name. (At least that stayed.)<\/p>\n

Concrete is also a sly portal into tackling perhaps the biggest issue in New York and everywhere: affordable housing. Wilson doesn\u2019t pretend to unlock any answers but his coverage of various promoted developments, political solutions and fervid community protests is proof that the road to civil progress is harder to set than any slab of you-know-what. A dangerously nondurable kind of concrete was used for a recently built skyscraper that is already crumbling from the inside. Oops?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m loath to synopsize \u201cThe History of Concrete.\u201d The gravitational joy of Wilson\u2019s comic approach is watching how he follows his instincts and later applies his own sui generis mortar to the assembled v\u00e9rit\u00e9 blocks. I don\u2019t mind teasing, however, that along the way you will encounter a faintly disturbing memorial business, get a new appreciation for public pool management and maybe wonder why you don\u2019t get to go to a kooky convention every year. He also discovers the unlikeliest of love stories, making the appealingly discursive, touchingly oddball \u201cHistory\u201d feel like a bent, colorful flower poking out of the pavement.<\/p>\n

‘The History of Concrete’<\/p>\n

Not rated<\/p>\n

Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes<\/p>\n

Playing: Opens Friday, Sept. 25 in limited release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across its three-season run on HBO, John Wilson\u2019s funny, observant docuseries-cum-tutorial \u201cHow to With John Wilson\u201d played like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":909048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[33913,49,48,11147,75,313983,4048,313980,337,3430,313982,313984,212172,208,313985,154541,313981,2535,8447],"class_list":["post-909047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-building","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-concrete","tag-entertainment","tag-fervid-community-protest","tag-history","tag-john-wilson","tag-movies","tag-new-york","tag-permanence","tag-political-solution","tag-quest","tag-review","tag-solidity","tag-stuff","tag-tenuous-place","tag-way","tag-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/909048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}