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I don't recommend City of Angels. Some better ways to "build out" from the film are:

To watch the documentary about its filming/construction. (This comes witht he DVD in the BMC library.)

To read Peter Handke's THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD, which is the source for a lot of the whisperings that the Angels hear/record. This book was written when Hankde--who had burst onto the literary scene as a wunderkind/enfant terrible in the 1960s--felt as if he had reached the end of the line as an artist...and was living in Paris and raising a child alone. The task he set himself was to write every day and to write only what seemed "true" to him. It constitutes, to some extent, a process of teaching himself how to write and to understand the world.

To review the film. Almost every time I see it, it shows itself as a different beast. Sometimes it's about the story of Damiel, other times it's a portrait of divided Berlin, others it's about the poetic aspects of ordinary lives, and (recently) I've seen the role of the storyteller, Homer, as being the "center" of my experience as a viewer. It's also a kind of Rilke in action adventure...

I do hear everything you say about why this may not be an easy film for our students, though.