Brentford are another antidote to what football has become at the highest level: complacent, self-serving and distanced from reality.
It's the sort of complacent, self-indulgent behaviour displayed by Adele over the last four years – during which she produced no music for her millions of adoring fans.
For type-A high achievers, music lessons leave no room for complacent self-congratulation. Adult amateurs get a paradoxically opposite benefit: a reminder to "enjoy the process".
Gilbert promises an uncomfortable read for those "used to the complacent, self-congratulatory tone set by standard accounts" and an unflinching look at the army's many failings.
There is a colloquy between the Lord of the Yellow River and the God of the Eastern Ocean, in which the complacent self-satisfaction of the lesser spirit is shaken by his unexpected meeting with inconceivable vastness.
That savory note — complacent self-importance mixed with schmaltzy sincerity — is Jacob's signature, and Mr. Pittu delivers it with infinite nuance but nary a wink, as Leonard coaxes Jacob through the highlights of his career.
It is the Baudelaire children, as it turns out, who recognize that the world is a capricious, irrational, and terrifyingly violent place; the adults who are charged with protecting them persist in a world of complacent self-deception.
But the deeper issue is that of how a culture of secretive arrogance and complacent self-oversight enabled him to leave with his pension, and senior officers to sell their souls to a media group in plain view of their colleagues.
But it will still be a discomfited choir: Von Trier explodes the complacent self-image of the US the way De Tocqueville once deflated its democracy, Upton Sinclair exposed the malevolence of its commerce and John Steinbeck exploded its illusion of community.
It's ultimately as complacent, self-absorbed and clueless as its heroine, and not always in an especially amusing way".
