‘Death always feels imminent’: a moving Netflix documentary on prison, music and forgiveness

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In Songs from the Hole, a man convicted of murder when he was a teenager finds healing in music during his sentence In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to “the hole” – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him. In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest...
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Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker review – ups and downs of a tennis legend

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Alex Gibney’s documentary about the disgraced German tennis star has wonderful archive footage and interviews but is ultimately unrevealing about its subject

Despite some great archive material and nice interview turns, this documentary portrait of disgraced German tennis legend Boris Becker from film-maker Alex Gibney is a frustrating and disappointing experience – because of the baffling way it is structured, both unrevealing and anticlimactic. It starts at the end, swoops back to the beginning and finally grinds to a halt somewhere around the middle. It could be that this is intended to be merely a first “episode”, though it isn’t billed as such.

We commence with Becker’s gripping downfall for tax evasion at London’s Southwark crown court in 2022, facing two-and-a-half years in prison and powerful interview testimony from the man himself: rueful, haunted, but rejecting self-pity. (In fact, Gibney seems to have had two interview sessions with him, one just before the verdict and one two years before that.) Then we cut back to his stunning 1985 Wimbledon triumph at the age of just 17, and his face is eerily cherubic.

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