Stratosphere Girl
Angela is a French art student living in Germany who loves to draw comics and creates elaborate tales drawn in a soft and romantic style. One night, Angela meets Yamamoto, a club DJ from Japan, who invites her to come to Tokyo with him. Infatuated with Yamamoto, Angela impulsively agrees, and is soon sharing an apartment with a handful of Western expatriates who work at a nightclub where Japanese businessmen drink, sing karaoke, and date the "hostesses" for a fee.
-
- Cast:
- Tara Elders , Filip Peeters , Burt Kwouk , Tuva Novotny , Rebecca Palmer , Togo Igawa , Peggy Jane de Schepper
Similar titles
Reviews
I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess
There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
When transitioning from the work week into the weekend or a short vacation, I like to watch a foreign film to transport my mind off into a different world. This movie about a European girl in Japan gave me a twofer, and filled the bill quite nicely. As a sci-fi, fantasy, and anime fan, I was intrigued by the title and subject, and was not disappointed.Chloé Winkel, in what's apparently her first feature film, plays angelic-looking Angela, a just-graduated (from high school) cartoonist who scurries off to Japan on the recommendation of Yamamoto (Jon Yang), whom she meets at her graduation party, and who gives her the name and address of a friend with whom she can stay.Once in Tokyo, Angela steps into a world of mystery, not just culturally, but also into one involving a missing bar girl. Entering the night club world herself provides Angela the opportunity to pursue the mystery; and her drawing what she "sees" blends imagination and reality into a mystery for the viewer.This film exhibits an unusual sense of continuity. Fueled by flashes between our heroine's drawings and actual live scenes (the multi-tiered inner-city roadways in Tokyo were particularly interesting to this never-been-there American), the tale is told not as a straightforward continuous sequence wherein one scene leads inevitably to the next, but rather as a series of apparently disconnected scenes which have the effect of making the action appear to occur over a longer period of time than it actually does, i.e., what seems like weeks in actuality are mere days.So what's real, what's imagination, what's flash-back or flash-forward? Suffice it to say that the ending, however "simplistic", breaks the wall between reality and fantasy, and resolves all mysteries for the viewer.
I rented this film on a bit of a whim, without having ever heard of it before, or at least not enough for me to have any early impressions. All I knew about it was from the blurb on the back of the DVD case, and based on that I thought it was pretty decent. It was certainly not the best movie I've ever seen - the movie certainly aimed to raise the hair on the back of your neck, get your adrenaline pumping, but the ending was a little boring. The Angela storyline was resolved nicely, but the mystery of the movie, the main driving force I guess, but the film was shot nicely and well thought out. I don't think it was made to be "about" Tokyo, but rather a group of young women living and working in Tokyo. I agree with the other reviewer that it could have taken place anywhere, but I don't think that makes the whole movie terrible. At any rate, I enjoyed it.
To me, the Stratosphere Girl is the perfect balance between suspense, love story and comic. And the the pictures! Every little scene has been carefully built to reach maximum optical effect. There are so many details to discover that seeing the movie once is not enough. I love this film! There, that is as simple as I can make it out. I am not going into any details about the plot or what takes place in the film, just want to say that this is the real deal. The film manages to carry a thin story with almost no plot whatsoever and be consistently interesting and entertaining throughout. On top of that it is all stunningly photographed. This picture is a must for every true movie fan.
even if it did stretch the bounds of believability more than just a little. I enjoyed the performances, found the pacing adequate, and the story interesting and different. Maybe it is a good idea, once in a while, to simply abandon audience expectations and simply tell a fantastic little story.Magnificent, slow-moving and well-told, "Stratosphere Girl" offers no intense drama, preferring instead a slow accumulation of subtle moments - shifts in color or seconds of eye contact - to express emotion and detail in the story. Such small, easily missed moments are surrounded by an eye-popping visual style - elegance is raised to unearthly levels throughout. An excellent film which has much to reveal.