It's hard to get people excited about concrete, I'm finding.

The History of Concrete — 3/5

Though loving John Wilson, I didn't finish watching the second season of 'How To...'. Towards the end of the series, there's an episode that kind of exposed that there was a certain amount of fakeness involved in the show. It felt like breaking a bond, and I didn't want to keep watching after that. Something seemingly inherent in his style is the random puzzle piecing together of random shots and scenes and rabbiting down a crack in the earth until he/you don't know where he is, and then you somehow pop your head back out of the same hole, ending where you began, some point being made, like magic, out of the random spirals of the universe. The line between 'a trick' and 'I'm tricking you' is speaking the words. The difference between sleight of hand and lying is just saying out loud that it's a lie. Uhhh I guess this is a review of season 2, not his new movie, oops. Uhh anyway, by now I'd forgotten my previous criticisms. Forgetfulness is the best path to forgiveness! Whee! And thus I was excited for this movie! To see if he can do what he does, scaled up, made me feel curious. And the movie then just made me feel tired. It's long! "Let's see where this goes..." works great in 15 to 25m excursions, but dragging it out just made the random cuts that are the hallmark of his work linger longer, drawing too much attention to themselves, which to me is the bellwether that he didn't really have a story, he just had a lot of footage that he needed to make use of.