#but it is such a breath of fresh air playing jack jeanne?

[cup-ah-jho]

Me, starting my playthrough of Jack Jeanne: Okay, I KNOW the Tokyo Ghoul mangaka worked on this, but this is still an otome game so like…how good will it actually be?

Me, after finishing one route: Sui Ishida, you madman, how did you do this???

[carcharsaur]

ok I finished jack jeanne for real (all cgs unlocked) time to blog about it. I think it's just straight up the best otome on the market you can play right now. albeitttt I don't play many indies but this game was just a powerhouse of heartfelt warmth and character growth god DAMN!!!! also the art is just so beautiful yay sui ishida

I don't wanna spoil much about the game even though I also want to gush about it but I'll put this under a cut cause I dunno how long I'll ramble

I can't even really think of any huge complaints. there's a couple small things still, nothing's perfect, but compared to literally any other otome I've played the lack of things I need to overlook is also a breath of fresh air!!! the one thing that's like, this genuinely might made it hard to recommend is that my final play time was 140 hours... and that was with a lot of fast-forwarding through repeated content and not much idling (unlike I usually do LOL) but MY GOD IT'S SO FUCKING WORTH IT.... PLEASE.... you can even play it as a strictly platonic game (which would cut down the hours by like at least half) and even then I think that would be worth buying it...

ALSO: VOICED HEROINE!! my fucking favorite. also she's amazing. my new fav otoge MC... I need her to be happy and successful forever or I will drown myself in tears ok

every LI genuinely tugged at my heart strings, I cried happy tears at the ending every time... it's like eating freshly baked cookies... just overwhelming warmth...

it also did the impossible by making me MISS high school, because I was in band and choir etc and it made me so damn nostalgic for the power of putting on a performance even if I was almost never center stage TvT this game is so earnest in it's efforts and care, I literally could feel the love in it... ahg

my favorite character though was Kai... I was expecting it but he still hit me harder than expected IN MULTIPLE WAYS REAL AS HELLLLLLLLLL BTWWWW v

also I wasn't expecting this game to handle social and gender norms in a like... way I'd actually identify with? because japan has a different history with all that especiallyy within the world of theater and a lot of modern japanese media has weird ways of. um. un-lgbt'ing their cast I'll say lmao. but this game pulled some shit off I wasn't expecting. I really really really enjoyed it (and I already enjoy the awkward or clumsy "heroine hides her gender" stories so maybe I'm biased here LOL) I know this game probably took soo much fucking money to make and who knows how many years but. god I want a sequel so bad THE SIDE CHARACTERS WERE SO GOOD. it's heart warming and filling but also so so charming I can't help but hope they make more. there's light novels and stuff but I doubt those will ever be officially translated T___T ah well

also the OST, especially the performance tracks sung by the cast ARE SO INSANELY GOOD !!!! 10/10 BABEY

anyway. kai clip to say goodbye

[chiseler]

JOHN GILBERT: Foolish Love

“In Hollywood’s most glittering days, he glittered the most,” wrote screenwriter Ben Hecht of John Gilbert. “He received ten thousand dollars a week and could keep most of it. He lived in a castle on top of a hill. Thousands of letters poured in daily telling him how wonderful he was…He was as unsnobbish as a happy child. He went wherever he was invited…He drank with carpenters, danced with waitresses and made love with whores and movie queens alike….He was being Jack Gilbert, prince, butterfly, Japanese lantern, and the spirit of romance.” It’s a loving tribute to a lost friend, but one man calling another man a “Japanese lantern” gives the game away a bit. Gilbert was too happy and too puffed-up about all those letters telling him how wonderful he was. He acted and lived at too high a pitch, and then the rug was pulled out from under him.

Born in a trunk and on the road with traveling players, Gilbert paid his dues in many silent features from 1915-1924, often for director Maurice Tourneur and often in unsympathetic parts, though he did snag a good role in a Mary Pickford movie, Heart o’ the Hills (1919). Gilbert had ambitions to be a writer and director, but he found he liked the attention that came with posing for the camera. He was high-strung and excitable, a big drinker who regularly fell madly in love with his co-stars.

Gilbert signed with MGM in 1924, appearing in the first film they released, Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Though Gilbert has little to do in that Lon Chaney movie, he looks very fetching in his Harlequin tights. As he pitches woo to Norma Shearer, his deep-set eyes flash and stare at her; he seems overeager, but also very eager to please. This was still the age of Rudolph Valentino, when Great Lovers and sheiks were very much appreciated by a large female audience.

The following year saw the release of two films that made Gilbert into a huge star: Erich Von Stroheim’s perverse super-production The Merry Widow and Vidor’s epic war film The Big Parade. In the Von Stroheim film, Gilbert holds himself stiffly when he spots his leading lady Mae Murray, as if his entire body were an erection, but lust turns to love in an instant on his face after she rebuffs his advances. Gilbert knew that film acting is a matter of letting feelings register mainly behind the eyes, and though he sometimes overdid the eye flashing and bulging, at his best he holds the screen with his hot-tempered playacting, his intense alternation between ardency and outrage.

As Jim, an idle rich man’s son who goes to war and falls in love in The Big Parade, Gilbert is more than up to the operatic intensity of his farewell scene with French girl Renée Adorée, and he also sustains the unusually long scenes in both the training section of the film and the later battle sequences, making fresh and original choices everywhere but particularly in the interaction he has with a dying enemy soldier as they wait in a trench together.

Lillian Gish was so impressed with The Big Parade that she asked for the whole creative team behind it for her own first MGM film, Vidor’s La Bohème (1926), where Gilbert bounds around with great confidence and vitality as her lover Rodolphe. This was impressive, but as nothing compared to his role as Leo von Harden (the ideal Gilbert character name!) in Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), where the title role was played by the young Greta Garbo, who is very much the dominant partner in their heavy-breathing, sex-crazed love scenes. They wallowed in each other both offscreen and on.

Gilbert had it all now: the best films, the best directors, the best wine, women and song. Not many stars can match that run of movies from The Merry Widow to The Big Parade to La Bohème to Flesh and the Devil. But Gilbert was a complainer, and he was always criticizing his roles and his films in interviews, which enraged MGM boss Louis B. Mayer. Stories differ on just why Mayer hated Gilbert so much, though Gilbert’s increasingly high salary and his constant biting of the hand that fed him were likely reasons enough. A widely repeated story by Vidor’s wife Eleanor Boardman about Gilbert physically attacking Mayer after Garbo jilted him at the altar seems to be false, or at least highly questionable.

Gilbert was safe for a while longer, playing a sexy antihero in Tod Browning’s The Show (1927) and re-teaming with Garbo in Edmund Goulding’s Love (1927), where he is at his most electrically confident with his increasingly remote leading lady. Garbo does sometimes make Gilbert seem crude by comparison in Love, but who doesn’t seem crude next to her? He had staring contests with Joan Crawford in Twelve Miles Out (1927) and Four Walls (1928) and was seemingly impressed by the self-destructive sexual magnetism of Jeanne Eagels in Man, Woman and Sin (1927). In A Woman of Affairs (1928), Gilbert willingly played a stiff prig, damping down his John Gilbert-ness for the sake of the story, a vestige of the company spirit from his early silent days.

And then sound came in. Gilbert made Redemption (1930), but it was held back and His Glorious Night (1929) was released first. The legend has been that Gilbert’s high voice ruined his film career, backed up by the persistent rumor that Mayer ordered the MGM sound engineer to turn up the treble on Gilbert’s scenes. One moment in His Glorious Night became infamous, and it can sometimes be seen in documentaries on the period: Gilbert repeatedly cries, “I love you, I love you” to his leading lady (Catherine Dale Owen), which supposedly embarrassed audiences and made them laugh.

Gilbert did not have a high or squeaky voice, which became the widely repeated untrue story about him. What he did have in his first talkies, unfortunately, was a nervous voice. Though it was basically a baritone, it was a jumpy, pinched, sometimes nasal baritone. His voice revealed something about his own insecurity, and this left him open to ridicule, first with Norma Shearer in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in The Hollywood Review of 1929 and then especially in Redemption, a gloomy career killer of a film set in Russia where Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman are cringe-worthily stilted in their dialogue scenes. The problem here was the way that he talked, not so much the sound of his voice.

In the next six talking films he made on his MGM contract, Gilbert completely fixed all of his initial vocal problems, but it seems to have been of no use. He was being paid a princely $250,000 a picture on his old contract, and he refused to negotiate down, which drove Mayer crazy. He butched it up very entertainingly with Wallace Beery in the lively Way for a Sailor (1930) and made the most of The Phantom of Paris (1931), a clever Gaston Leroux story where he actually deliberately pitches his voice higher when his character wears a disguise, as if he wanted to show off his new vocal flexibility. But his high salary meant that his talkies couldn’t afford the type of female star he had played with in the silents, and he gradually lost his audience.

He was also losing roles to John Barrymore and Clark Gable, whose bluff and hearty voice was as secure as granite by comparison, but he made one last-ditch effort to get his career back on track with Downstairs (1932), a little corker of Pre-Code nastiness that he provided the story for. As a manipulative servant who contemptuously presents himself as a sexual object for women, Gilbert puts all of his own anger and skill and talent into his role. He loved playing unsympathetic but charismatic characters, and this film lets him go all the way with that. Downstairs is a revelation, but it was ahead of its time, something that might have been a hit in the 1960s. Not many noticed it in 1932.

Floundering without work or contract, Gilbert was excited and grateful when his old partner in love Garbo insisted that he play opposite her in Queen Christina (1933), but that seeming rescue did him no real favors. He seems very uncomfortable as a Spanish ambassador, scared literally stiff as his co-star acts rings around him, seemingly out of his time and element. Worse, he got in trouble when he argued with the studio about how their first love scene should be played. Gilbert never moved past the more relaxed period of 1915-1925 when everybody helped out and pitched in. He was temperamentally unsuited to the large studio era, and he could not shake off the air of failure that had seeped into his press and his own life.

Speaking in 1933, Gilbert referenced a press article that had been titled, “Is John Gilbert Through?” He thought that the question was its own answer. “Another editor wrote that, after seeing and hearing me in His Glorious Night, he felt as though he had just had news that his dearest friend had been stricken with a malignant and incurable disease,” Gilbert said mournfully. Another newspaper referred to him as having been “once regarded as the ‘great lover’ of the screen—that is to say, in the year B.G. (Before Gable).”

In his final film The Captain Hates the Sea (1935), which was made for Columbia, Gilbert had arrived at that sad place where he was such a drunk that he could only play a drunk. Many things did Gilbert in before he died of heart failure in 1936, hoping to make a comeback with his lover Marlene Dietrich in Desire (1936). Though he could be immature, he was smart enough to realize that some of his downfall had been his own doing. He is one of the more tragic examples of a star taking their own publicity to heart, first for the thrill of the praise and then for the confirmation of all gnawing doubts of self-worth.

by Dan Callahan