CLIMBER’S HIGH (Japan, 2008)
Directed by: Masato Harada
Starring: Shin’ichi Tsutsumi, Masato Sakai, Machiko Ono, Masahiro Takashima, Tsutomo Yamazaki

"A scoop's like a climb," old-school "belt-and-suspenders" reporter Yuuki Kazumasa (ALWAYS patriarch Shinichi Tsutsumi) tells his spitfire female protege. "Weight on each foot, and small steps."  An amateur mountaineer himself, Yuuki found himself in for the climb of a lifetime on August 12, 1985, when Japan Airlines Flight 123, en route to Osaka, smashed into Mount Takamagahara with 524 passengers onboard.  Adapted from the novel by Hideo Yokoyama, CLIMBER'S HIGH is a true-life account of the JAL 123 tragedy from a unique perspective, inside the bullpen of the North Kanto Times, where a henpecked fleet of reporters are at the epicenter of a national tragedy right in their backyard.  As big-name papers from Tokyo and around the world swarm into Gunma Prefecture seeking the scoop, Yuuki must navigate office politics, petty grievances, ego meltdowns, and the inexorable grind of professional bureaucracy to make sure the "local paper" remains the most trusted and thorough source on the scene.

The forces mounted against Yuuki include a veritable "who's who" of popular Japanese cinema, with Takashi Miike stalwart Kenichi Endo (VISITOR Q) as a priggish city editor coasting on past glories like the Red Army lynchings (dramatized in NYAFF '08 stunner UNITED RED ARMY), and the one-of-a-kind Tsutomu Yamazaki (DEPARTURES) as the lecherous, puppy-rearing North Kanto publisher, lolling in his wheelchair like the Emperor Palpatine of print journalism.  Alluding to shady doings in his past with Yuuki's "good time girl" mother, he has mysteriously shepherded our hero's career (like every anime villain) and now seeks to break him like one of his dogs.  But Yuuki won't be tamed, refusing to cede an inch of valuable line space to the Circulations department or ad-copy in his tireless quest for comprehensive reporting.  Before the week is out, there'll be one coma victim, one death, one mah-jongg duel, one office riot, and two cases of PTSD.  But it's still not enough for Yuuki, who demands, above all, that his reporters "check, double-check!"  And hey, what about the Yuuki some twenty-odd years into the future, dangling from a jagged mountain ledge?

NYAFF veteran Masato Harada (THE SHADOW SPIRIT) directs CLIMBER'S HIGH with a sure hand and unerring, driven confidence, not unlike Yuuki Kazumasa himself, supported by uniformly excellent performances.  Drawing once again on his love for the work of Hollywood legend Howard Hawks, Harada depicts the men and women of the North Kanto with grit, candor and above all, snappiness, as the dialogue and drama streams a mile a minute with an all-business, "no time for love, Dr. Jones!" rat-a-tat that would make Humphrey Bogart proud. 

Harada's characters aren't immune from his adoration of Old Hollywood either - late in the film, Yuuki tells a friend of his longing to be Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's subversive newspaperman classic ACE IN THE HOLE.  In a film where the plane crash is never shown offscreen, it would've been easy to make a dry, bloodless piece from a story of reporters on the beat.  But what makes CLIMBER'S HIGH truly special is its vehement refusal to be reduced to talking heads in suits and ties under flourescent lights - with Yuuki's hot-blooded passion driving the paper forward past all obstacles, the film does for old-fashioned print journalism what "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney" did for lawyers, lifting it into the realm of stylized Japanese melodrama yet never losing its hard-edged, Sidney Lumet-esque realism, leaving you simultaneously admiring its candor while screaming "Ganbatte!" at the screen, as an aged Yuuki, never a quitter, reaches for the pick embedded in the cliff face, representing his estranged son.