frangible

Robert Pattinson has given better performances in better films than The Rover, yet it’s a brief scene from David Michod’s outback dystopian thriller that I always think of when it comes to defining his strange, frangible screen persona.

As a child of Los Angeles, I have a relationship with reality that is frangible at best.

But, before us, entombed in the banks of the stream, was a mucky tropical sea bottom, where thin, frangible layers of gray siltstone marked the passage of centuries.

Details needed to be worked out, such as a requirement that school guns fire only frangible bullets, which break into small pieces and are unlikely to pass through victims, as a way to limit the danger to innocent students.

The authors go deep into the patent registry to extract strange nuggets of industrial poetry: “mouth comfort” and “sealable coupling” and “frangible closure” and “upstanding thumb catches.”