disgusting, overrated, pointless

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

In her high-school graduation party in Sweden, the Belgian Angela (Chloé Winkel) meets the Japanese DJ Yamamoto (Jon Yang) and tells him that she does not like to study, but draw, and she would like to travel to seek adventures. Yamamoto tells her that he has a friend, Monika (Tuva Novotny) that works as hostess in a nightclub for men in Tokyo and gives her address to Angela. The heroin Angela travels and meets Monika, and gets a job escorting executives in the club. When she finds that the Russian girl Larissa (Peggy Jane de Schepper) is missing, Angela decides to investigate the mystery and discovers a murder case."Stratosphere Girl" is a very original and intriguing story, presented in a stylish cinematography of film-noir showing Tokyo at night. The plot is totally unpredictable, never uses clichés and has an unexpected twist in the quite open end. While watching the movie, I found apparent flaws in the story that are very well resolved with the conclusion, when the viewer finally sees that the whole plot was fabricated by the imaginative Angela while drawing a "manga" at home. Like in a dream, Angela tells that she is "a visitor in her own world" and the story has a happy end and, disclosing the subtle line between reality and the fantasy of her cartoon. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Traços de 1 Crime" ("Traces of 1 Crime")

Stratosphere Girl attempts to be the film, Lost in Translation pretended to be. It gave a dreamy interpretation of a foreigner lost in Tokyo's netherworld of "hostess" bars. A Belgian student-graduate notices disappearances of girls while working part time at a bar. This is a very real phenomena, because foreign girls are in demand in Tokyo, particularly. A few years ago a similar thing happened to an English girl in 2003. Usually some of the girls, if not most are illegally trafficked in. This film gives an impression of Japan not shown in Lost in Translation. As Angela begins to illustrate her experiences, each transition is materialized. She narrates her story weaving it within her drawings. The director uses lots of natural light and switches to hand-held camera work to give intimacy to the settings.As she descends into the mystery of the disappearance of Larissa, she meets many archetypes of Japan's powerful underworld. she wishes she could merge with the comic world and often does. Stratosphere Girl is a dream-laden neo-noir film detailing the reality of foreign hostess bars. Its sort of an abstraction between Lost in Translation and American Splendor. her apt quote best describes "the Stratosphere Girl"'s adventure:"When one is looking for something, everything has meaning."

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.

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.