Take Richard Price, whose eight-episode HBO crime series, "The Night Of," culminates not in one of the testy, street-smart exchanges for which his novels and screenplays are known but, rather, in a long, baleful stare between two characters.
However, Katerina's music constantly collides with the bilious satire meted out by Shostakovich to all the other characters, much of it loaded with baleful parodies of other composers' works.
Little does he know — though we by that point do — that all three of the characters will end up inhabiting precisely that baleful, desolate realm: A betrayal in terms of the promise held out to us by life that is just one of the multiple meanings of the title made sorrowfully clear by this shimmering production.
The title character, a dispossessed talent agent played with a baleful mien by Alfred Molina, is seated on a park bench with a do-it-yourself death kit: a giant bottle of pills, whiskey, a razor.
A chunky, black-garbed, bearded man with a perpetually baleful countenance, "Moqtada," as his followers call him, is a remarkable character.
The baleful Alexi Lalas also has a supporting role somewhere.
Inside the country, however, the role of the KGB was baleful.
Frank's prose is as clear and cold as a well-iced Martini, and lets the characters skewer themselves, from sad-sack Dingleman and his baleful nemesis to an overtanned P.R. agent who proudly wears her company's logo — two teeth biting into the globe — and a liberal welfare expert who rolls up the car windows when he drives through blighted neighborhoods.
Moreover, Godwin's view of man's progressive character might be defended by placing greater weight on eliminating the baleful effects of the social and political institutions of the European aristocracies than on the epistemological dimensions of the account.
She is and remains a pallid figure, as do the other characters (Russians excepted), apart from one or two who are baleful cartoons.
