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

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...

Oppenheimer: sex, death and impending apocalypse – discuss with spoilers

Christopher Nolan’s film about the godfather of the nuclear bomb is impressive, and Cillian Murphy the perfect man for the job, but do women get a raw deal and is it all too sanitised?

  • This article contains spoilers for Oppenheimer

J Robert Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic legacy has haunted modern politics and culture, but his personal story is not obvious blockbuster material. It would take a film-maker of the talent, and Hollywood heft, of Christopher Nolan to pull it off.

Oppenheimer opened in the US last weekend with a box office haul of $82m, second to Barbie’s gargantuan $162m. The instincts of Nolan, and his backers at Universal Studios, have been rewarded in a way that, hopefully, bodes well for the future of big-budget films about difficult subjects (Nolan isn’t the only purveyor of such work, but there aren’t many around).

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/1uiA3F7
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

EXCLUSIVE: Mona Singh gears up for an intense role in an upcoming web series; Deets inside!

The Sound of Music rights acquired for Paparao Biyyala's film Music School starring Shriya Saran, Sharman Joshi