You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left.
With such pretentious characters as Frasier and Niles, the writers were able to unleash their vocabularies, creating some of the most-articulate phrases that impeccably captured the ironies of those characters' perceptions of themselves and, though explicitly highbrow, resonated with audiences from all classes.
In other words, the time is ripe for Ms. Bag to revive one of her most reliably acerbic characters: the pretentious art student.
As James Wood wrote in a review of the book for The New Yorker, Heti seems to insist on a certain kind of superficiality: she reproduces all her characters' most pretentious, cynical, and self-absorbed thoughts.
The background: Gabriel Bruce has been recommended to us by a friend who tells us he's "pretentious, classy and a proper character".
In the first episode, there's a Hey, Boobs! moment even more gratuitous than the ones in "Magic City"; it's vaguely arty and pretentious; it's full of characters who either secretly dislike each other or openly dislike each other and all in all, make for a sour atmosphere.
And of course he made a famous cameo in "Annie Hall," appearing alongside Woody Allen's character to denounce a pretentious moviegoer.
In The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment his character assassination of a pretentious young woman he slept with is hilarious but horrible.
But Schiele, then a 22-year-old iconoclast and libertine and played by Glenn Fitzgerald with appropriately pretentious self-regard, is actually a minor character in the play.
Other observations, like his comparison of the cat burglar in "To Catch a Thief" to a character out of Camus, are pretentious as well.
It is a sentence--bold and high-mindedly humorous (if not outright pretentious), addressing not just a woman's character but the status of her century--that could have been written only by Brodkey.
