That was for safety, he said, comparing it to the way the police set up a perimeter for the press around crime scenes and calamitous events.
For every conventional comic scene – Ria's calamitous cookery, a car prang, keep-fit class, nosy neighbour or family squabble – there was an internal Ria monologue or dream sequence.
And this week - it strikes me - a more revealing perspective has been emerging in the courtroom, as the police's calamitous handling of the crime scene at Pistorius's home has come under a glaring spotlight.
There's even a scene in which Jor-El narrates Krypton's rise and calamitous fall using immersive, metallic-gray images that morph and scroll across the frame like an animated version of a W.P.A. bas-relief mural.
No wonder that the Queen Vic in "EastEnders", one of Britain's most popular TV soaps, was the scene of three extra-marital impregnations, two criminal raids, two murders and, in September, a calamitous fire, probably arson, which burned it to the ground.Drama suits pubs.
And, of course, the vast linked tracking shots along a traffic jam in Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend"—one of the greatest and most emblematic scenes of the modern cinema are sparked by rubbernecking after one of the movie's many calamitous car accidents.
Sorrentino may well have been influenced by Nanni Moretti's We Have A Pope (2011), about the troubled papacy of John Paul I, with its comic scenes of all the Cardinals together in their little cell-like bedrooms and the new Pontiff's calamitous failure to give a stirring address to the faithful in St Peter's.
Not calamitous or terminal.
The result was calamitous.
Calamitous is probably better.
