User reviews

The story (if you can call it that) is of a girl who works in a Tokyo hostess bar only to uncover a bizarre murder mystery. The screenplay is a rambling mishmash of ideas that -while not entirely successful- maintains our interest throughout and leaves us scratching our heads in bewilderment. From the opening scene, we are submerged into the film's environment without warning or introduction, and without expectation, for that matter. The plot is so non-linear and, quite frankly, non-important that we have no choice but to take the picture on its own terms. Even though nothing seems to fit from a conventional perspective, every bizarre moment of the script seems perfectly ordinary within the film's world. None of the characters seem remotely aware of just how strange their surroundings are, and this is how the film manages to succeed. The film-maker does not even TRY to offer an explanation for anything that takes place, he just presents it and expects us to draw our own conclusions. And even if you never reach a conclusion, as was the case with me, it is still an entertaining experience.

For all those who love beautiful pictures, charming music and comics.

The shots are well-framed and every scene has been thought out. Definitely a visually stunning movie. The storytelling is sophisticated and stylized as well. It is slow in some parts, but intentionally so, and the fact that it was didn't bother me. You will remember this film because of its unique and very recognizable director's style, the high energy level due to variation in static close-ups and dynamic scenes shot by the moving camera, a love story that touches but stays away from clichés, a plot that plays with stereotypes of comics and leaves enough space for your imagination. It is a piece of art in fact rather than a simple criminal story, a pleasure for eyes and soul, calm, peaceful and touching... and what can I say more: I strongly recommend 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.

It's like a lost in Translation meets Solaris meets L' Amant meets The Grudge. Even though the director M. X. Oberg's rendering techniques such as transforming the comics into the live actions and vice versa, use of handy-cam, etc. are somewhat different from the rest, the story itself tells nothing more than a Jonathan Kaplan's 1983 TV flick Girls of the White Orchid in which Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an innocent L.A. girl who was tricked by a yakuza into servitude as a Tokyo nightclub hostess/prostitute instead of her dream of becoming a singer. However Oberg remarks that the story is based on his encountering in the airplane with a German girl who worked for Tokyo nightclub, or a presumed relation with a murder case of a British barmaid disappeared from Roppongi nightclub in 2003, as I stated earlier, the similarity with White Orchid, which also allegedly based on a true event, is sine dubio, and this kind of exoticism/orientalism has been reiterated in all over the places from Ridley Scott's big budget Black Rain to the Master Card TV Commercials, or from Shirley MacLaine's disguise as a geisha to Emmanuelle Riva's love affair in Hiroshima; just to name a few. We live in the twenty-first century and are still have a deep chasm between the East and the West. This is what it reminds me when it shows excessive slow motions and dizzy flash backs by which they dispel the use of handy-cam with synchronous audio recording intended to represent the realism not the orientalism.

The main character is a 18-year-old blond girl Angela. Her passion is to draw comics. After graduating from high-school she's going to look for some adventures... So Angela spontaneously takes up the idea of a Japanese DJ Yamamoto she meets at her graduation party ... and flies off to TOKYO! Everything she sees, she expresses in her drawings.. but some bad things are going on at her new working place... Someone has been murdered... Angela draws and draws... soon it seems, that reality and comics are mixed up.. where's the line between?

Even though the artistic and technical side of mixing comics and "real-life" was interesting and even though it was shot in Tokyo..I have to tell, that I didn't like this movie. Max 3 points in 10 point scala. And those points are for the artistic side! And I'm sad, because I expected quite a lot from this film. So what was the problem for me? It was too slow, it was too naive and I'm sorry, but I wasn't so very thrilled about the actors. I have to tell you, that only one actor, Filip Peeters, (a "bad guy") left an impression for me.. I felt cold and even a little bit scared when I saw him on screen, so he LEFT an impression. The others didn't. By the way.. after I saw the film I remembered a film which I saw exactly one year ago.. last autumn -"Ruang rak noi nid mahasan"/"Last Life in the Universe" by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Thailand, Japan; 2003). They are not comparable.

People who like slow-on-going movies, a little bit romance plus "murder to be solved" and actually, a totally out-of-a-blue ending films, should go and see it.

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.

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.

this film is disappointing in several ways. 1. the end: the movie just kind of stops after having built up a quite exciting development; what i mean is, the solution is somewhat unsatisfying. this ending might be a good idea for a short film, but for a feature film it's simply frustrating.

2. this is supposed to be, as i took it from the promotion material, a film about tokyo. well this it is not. it might almost as well have been shot in Paris or new york. the image this film gives of tokyo mainly consists of a few clichés. you don't get a feeling of what tokyo REALLY is like, of what makes this particular city unique. hadn't i read that it's supposed to be a "tokyo-film", i wouldn't have guessed it. (it's not at all a problem for the film that it lacks this dimension; the film has it's own atmosphere, that is quite interesting and suspenseful enough; i was just disappointed because it was declared as a "tokyo-film" beforehand). thus, apart from the ending, this film is not bad; i just wish we had skipped the last three minutes and made up our own finale.

I am not the biggest art movie fan in the world, but sometimes these films drift into areas that interest me and I check the out. I usually end up scratching my head in bewilderment. This also is a confusing but gorgeus film. I loved it from the opening scenes to its strange ending. The film progresses by a series of well thought out scenes, the visual contents of which are more important than either the action or the plot. It is the imagery that makes it so intriguing, I guess. Well, I suppose it's hard to explain without writing a whole essay, but I definitely suggest you to watch it, provided you have nothing against Tokyo, comics or blond girls. It should be seen on a large screen, it is breathtaking!

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'm giving this movie a half n half of five in order to say, that as a guy-- this movie may play differently to a fem. I gave this one a try in my usual weekly attempts to see NON-Hollywood flicks. As a rule, I stay away from chick-flicks because there isn't enough action or thriller plot to hold my attention (Doesn't mean they're bad! I guess I'm admitting to a limitation)

Like others have said before-- visually nice and evocative of what Tokyo at night must be like. The transitions between her drawings and the story are very well done. And the storyline about the lives of foreign girls in the Host Bars has an initial draw of the outre. As a Guy, I found the story's rendition of what the Japanese male clientele are like to be creepy.

But past the initial impression, for a Guy with not too sophisticated tastes, the movie becomes super languid. There is a plot-- but it's all smothered by a female tempo. Dialogue is all soft-soft talk, murmurs, glances, sidelong looks, smouldering looks, turned shoulders, tentative gazes. . .by the time someone SLAPPED someone-- I was like ALRIGHT!!!

Then it slide back down to murmury girl-talk.

If you're a guy-- get this movie if you need to score brownie points with your significant other.

Well, it's actually not a movie about a foreign cartoonist in Japan.

I watched this movie during JIFFEST 2004 (Jakarta Int'l Film Festival). A foreign girl left her country for Japan, hoping to find a new life. Back in her city, she had a Japanese boyfriend. He often told stories about Japan, and it made her interested. This girl loved to draw anything, especially things that happened around her, into panels. So it's very close to a comic.

In Japan, I forgot what city, she shared an apartment with other foreign girls. Most (if not all) work in a nightclub. She also worked in the same club, for a living. While she's there, she drew many scenes based on what happened around her. And then something terrible happened...and she made her own investigation...and drew her findings/ imagination/ etc into papers.

What I love about Stratosphere Girl is the ability to portrait a very nice-looking innocent girl, with a very imaginative mind, into a world of deception, crime, illegal foreign workers life in Japan. She followed her instincts to follow the mystery, although it would endanger her life.

The cinematography was very good, and I really like the way it shot night-life in Japan. Her drawings (I don't know if it's actually her drawing, or the director have it for her) were very beautiful, only using colored pencils (if I'm not mistaken). I wished those drawings were available commercially as a comic book.

This movie could fall into a thriller category, not just drama. I wished the director could made this movie more thrilling. But this is not a Hollywood movie=), but the director thrilled us in a different way.

Man. Did this film stink! One of the worst films I have ever seen. And I don't mean that in a good way. Everything about this film is bad. OK, there are a few decent shots of Tokyo freeways after dark. So what. They're wasted anyway. The acting is, like, are you kidding me? And the writing is so bad it's almost as if somebody collected all the mindless notes scribbled then discarded at Starbucks and turned them into something resembling a screenplay. It's too bad; the setting is rife with possibilities. But guess what? There's no story here worth printing on soiled toilet paper. Trust me, you're better off jumping off a building into a swimming pool filled with sour cream. Read a book or something.

A little strange at times, but since when has that been a bad thing? This nice and intelligent film is structured on many layers, full of intrigue and double meanings. The plot leaves some things unanswered, which is quite irritating, but not to consider as an actual flaw.

Some characters remind me of some of Lynch's disturbing, mysterious figures. And this German (?) director tries to give the film an extra layer via images, which he mostly succeeds.

I recommend it. It is exquisitely performed and filmed.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of complicated films that unfold slowly and need to be watched several times. But with this film, it seemed to me as if it was trying to be complex and appear deeper than it actually is. It touches on social issues, but doesn't go into them in any depth. Visually, I liked some parts of it, partly because it's set in Tokyo, but the rest was somehow dull and dreary.

To fully get this movie, it helps to know how it was conceived. Director/writer M.X.O was sitting on a plane when a gorgeous blonde took the seat next to him. She had a black eye. Eventually she told him her story which loosely served as the plot of Stratosphere Girl. At the same time he had been working on a different idea about an artist who tells & experiences a story through drawing.

The point is that this film is two distinctly different ideas melded into one excellent & artistic film. On the surface it's a straightforward story (the tale of the blonde with a black eye), but within that story--as well as surrounding that story--is the story of an artist simultaneously creating & experiencing a fantasy. The mixture of these two approaches was brilliantly executed with stylish, slightly disorienting visuals which convey the feeling of detachment and exclusion that the heroine feels. The mood is cold & sterile, vividly recreating a feeling you may recognize if you've ever been alone in a foreign country. So much of this film rests on feelings like that, moods & experiences that may resonate within you. It creates a very memorable atmosphere like in a Wim Wenders film or maybe even the movie "The Usual Suspects" (note: I'm talking about mood, not plot!).

The story takes a very slick twist toward the end which gives us a lot to munch on. It's not an overt M.Night Shyamalan gimmick but rather a clever & subtle detour that'll keep you thinking for hours afterward. I was very pleasantly surprised by this obscure gem, and I'll be keeping an eye out for this director's works in the future.

Jon Yang is a truly beautiful artist. I want to see him in more. OK, in this film they don't use his real voice, he's actually British born I have found out so has a lovely deep English accent. But his acting is enough for you to want to see the whole movie. He is such a sensitive actor and I can't lie he's gorgeous to. Looking forward to seeing, "Act Of Grace', his newest film where apparently he plays the leader of a Trihad gang. Quite different to his romantic lead role in this film.

Matthias X. Oberg is a superb Director also, he mustn't go unmentioned. It's a shame he hasn't had a project out in awhile. If you like independent movies and you like watching talented actors check out Jon Yang and this film.

This is a story about a Belgium high school girl's start in her career as a comic strip author just as she graduates, and what she did, or was trying to do, to land her first contract to produce a strip out of her workshop in her mother's house. Most of the movie is about her nascent storyline, with her as the hero who must triumph, as she draws and works out the Manja-style comic strip. Now, most of her story involves seedy adult Eurotrash working in the Tokyo sex trade and the the Japanese men who exploit them in porno rituals to entertain corporate salary-men. The presence of the young Belgium high school girl provides a startling, even unsettling note since she looks not a day older than 15 years. The first clue that the story is imaginary is seeing that child anywhere near the Tokyo Ginga district. In one odd scene she objects to dressing up as a 9 year old, and all the while on her the costume appears not out of place. There is some soft-core porn. This is a great film, and a great way to see a modern EU coming of age story. The entire perspective of the film is grounded in Geneva, in spite of the Tokyo locale.