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How to with John Wilson

Bozo_Casanova

By Bozo_Casanova
in Movies and TV

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Bozo_Casanova

Bozo_Casanova 26,472

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I didn't see a thread on this, and I watched it for the first time last night. It's beautiful, brilliant, funny, bizarre, tender and bone-dry witty without being ironic or cruel in any way. I'm still processing it, but I think it might be the best and most original thing I've seen in years. HBO's been reaching for Prestige Television for a while, and this feels like they fell into it by accident. 

 

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Vito Andolini

Vito Andolini 9,126

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A year and a half later, here’s a necrobump with value…

Terrific, quirky show on HBO/Max. Read about it in the NYT, and watched the first season is essentially one session (6 episodes, only about half an hour each), and I’m now thru 4 of the 6 in S2. I think Season One was better, but still a good watch. 

Maybe a little like the early days of Michael Moore, but without the political agenda (the rabbit lady in Roger and Me would have been a perfect John Wilson interview subject).

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/magazine/how-to-john-wilson.html

You might think that there’d be something uncanny about walking around New York with the filmmaker John Wilson, insofar as that’s what much of his HBO series, “How To With John Wilson,” consists of: We see footage he’s magpie’d from around the city while he muses, in his thoughtful-Muppet voice, along baggy themes. A morning stroll near his building, in Ridgewood, Queens, did not offer up anything with the kind of Wilsonian surreality the show specializes in — but our destination, a dollar store Wilson described as one of his favorites, did. He told me that he spends a lot of time in dollar stores when he has writer’s block. Nearby he pointed out a display of tools from Trisonic, a budget brand he investigated in a 2016 short film, before collecting the things he’d come for: sink strainers, a miniature folding chair, a toilet seat with a fluffy white Pomeranian printed on its lid. On the way to the checkout, he marveled at a product he said he’d already purchased from a different dollar store: a clock radio with a built-in fish tank far too tiny for a fish, a “cool dollar-store-only object.” The entire place suddenly felt like a tidy analogue of Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.

“How To,” now in its second season, is (nominally) a tutorial, offering advice on subjects like wine appreciation and parking, and (formally) a documentary, following its themes to a bowling-ball factory or to interview a teenage real estate agent — and (ultimately) a form of memoir, a personal essay on video. But Wilson does magic with his staggering archive of street footage, all full of details that, if you encountered them yourself, you’d ponder for days: peculiar behaviors, dreamlike coincidences, strange omens and general “glitches in the Matrix,” as he puts it. Two workers mop a sidewalk in balletic unison; a man in a parked car idly sucks a woman’s toes; a woman places a live pigeon in a Duane Reade bag like a salad she’ll finish later. “Sharing your most intimate thoughts can be a disturbing and messy experience,” Wilson observes, as we watch a police officer pluck a sweater from a pool of blood on a subway floor. It would take a lot of footage to craft a timeline of romance from images of people publicly flirting, groping, proposing, marrying and bickering, and even more to end it with paramedics removing a corpse from an apartment building. Imagine the volume you’d need to be able to end it, as Wilson does, with paramedics dropping that body.

There are highbrow precedents for Wilson’s close attention to the strange-and-ordinary, but what “How To” often resembles is the stuff you’d see posted to Twitter or TikTok in 20-second chunks, with glib captions about urban living or relatable moods. Wilson, who is 35, says that he loves seeing that kind of stuff online — “but I find it so tragic that it just kind of disappears.” He’d always felt compelled to build something larger from that material, lest it vanish into a “formless blob of content” or rot on an old hard drive. “The impulse to make the work like this to begin with,” he says, “was about giving a shape to all the stuff I was afraid of losing.”

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thrillhammer

thrillhammer 683

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love the show.  very funny, but would be worth watching even without audio whatsoever.  his shots of nyc highlight the beauty and absurdity of living in the city.  he does interview people and they're crazy weird people that you expect live in nyc.   i missed his landlord this latest season.  she was a real winner.

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Bozo_Casanova

Bozo_Casanova 26,472

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13 hours ago, thrillhammer said:

love the show.  very funny, but would be worth watching even without audio whatsoever.  his shots of nyc highlight the beauty and absurdity of living in the city.  he does interview people and they're crazy weird people that you expect live in nyc.   i missed his landlord this latest season.  she was a real winner.

She makes an appearance 

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Celery Man

Celery Man 20,961

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 Is the show going away?

This is such a specific show, I love it but didn't rip through season 2. I just remembered it and went back to it the other night and watched the "how to throw out your batteries" ep. So much heart to this show, so much of me sitting there seeing what he's doing like 

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seriously, just the touching genius of this, talking about how to get rid of difficult trash and the risks involved down the chain and then just segueing flawlessly into the nature of carrying emotional baggage and being able to let things go, chef's kiss

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Texzilla58

Texzilla58 4,738

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I hope we get more seasons. Such a great show just focused on people, situations, and weirdness without ANY political spin, discussion of race, MAGA, guns, gender or sexuality. Refreshing. And. Clever and funny.

Visiting his old landlord in Vegas. Poignant. Burning man trip

I hope we get more seasons. Such a great show just focused on people, situations, and weirdness without ANY political spin, discussion of race, MAGA, guns, gender or sexuality. Refreshing. And. Clever and funny.

Visiting his old landlord in Vegas. Poignant. Burning man trip

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