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.
Review of Stratosphere Girl
