The upheaval underscores how investors on both sides of the Atlantic have soured on the vision of uniting old-line media companies with the Internet.
The movie turns ugly, and the development of the McDonald's empire comes off as the embodiment of a dream turned sour, of a grand vision corrupted by the will to power.
"A bad experience, unfortunately, can really sour somebody's complete vision of what therapy is," Metzger says.
"WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET!" he declares at one point, in a rant that goes viral on the Internet as his dream sours into a nightmare vision of a land in which "the winners," who own the future, trample over "the dead and dying and forgotten, the endangered species of the world, the nonadaptive".
Martyn Waites stands out in the crowded field of young British noir writers currently in competition for the most sour, cynical, hopeless, unrelentingly bleak vision of criminal injustice.
More worryingly, perhaps, there are no guarantees that "vision" won't turn sour.
For years, I've had the feeling the Boomers were a triumphant failure, the promise gone sour as Altamont sullied the Woodstock vision.
Until things went sour in Iraq, theirs would be a vision of the Goliath tale in which David (or various ragtag Sunni, Shiite, and Pashtun versions of the same) didn't even have a walk-on role.
Filmmakers have positively reveled in the opportunity to conjure up visions of the sweet or sour hereafter.
All of which brings up Mr. Blagojevich, or at least the vision of him if things go sour at his coming criminal trial.
