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There’s a brilliant scene in Tamara Jenkins’s fantastic new movie The Savages in which Laura Linney, as a fastidious aspiring playwright, is bickering with her older lover, a married man named Larry (Peter Friedman). Larry declares that their relationship reminds him of The Blue Angel, and he condescendingly explains, “You know–Marlene Dietrich? Von Stroheim?” Linney’s character scowls viciously and says, “Von Sternberg!” If only poor Larry had read The Snob Cheat Sheet for Confusing Similarities (pp. 30-34 of The Film Snob’s Dictionary), he wouldn’t have gotten himself into this mess.
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Kraftwerk. Acutely German, acutely secretive inventors of “robot rock” (their preferred term), a highly mechanized dance-pop heavy on synthesizers, vocoders, and lyrics about robots, computers, trains, and bicycles. Founded in Düsseldorf in the late ’60s by the KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN-influenced art students Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk effectively invented electronic pop music with their five albums released between 1974 and 1981, Autobahn, Radioactivity, Trans-Europe Express, The Man Machine, and Computerworld, all the while toying with Teutonic stereotypes by appearing in photographs as waxen, short-haired, emotionless mannequins. Hütter and Schneider have since become semi-recluses, infrequently releasing albums and playing live, though it’s said that they beaver away at their Düsseldorf studio, KlingKlang, on a daily basis.