self-regard

Hawke doesn’t overload their delicate dances or any of his other scene partnerships with an insistence on pulling the spotlight, true to his character’s unspoken self-regard as a guide who happens to investigate his curiosities.

The entire movie has a disappointing air of smug self-regard about it, with an expectation the audience will adore everything about the characters as much as they do.

Here, food is rarely appetizing, but it is always expressive, a kind of edible theater for the gang’s obsessions, failures and pathological self-regard.

Writer and director Jesse Armstrong never indulges the urge to humanize his narcissistic main characters by giving them secret soft sides or limits on their self-regard.

He sent his “Hitchhiker’s” hero Zaphod Beeblebrox through the Vortex only to have the machine confirm his self-regard: “I'm a really terrific and great guy!”