My father left me with many things — a healthy distaste for authority, a conviction that you put in a full effort when you commit to doing something, and a belief that you never back down from your core values. 

Oh, and there's one other thing he left for me: a family history of colon cancer, which requires me to submit to screenings at a more frequent cadence than I would like. I do not get to send in the cheerful Cologuard box. I have to go into the office for the full workup.

So this past weekend, I made the switch to a low-fiber diet for a few days, went off solid foods Sunday and drank a jug full of sludge into early Monday morning that liquified anything remaining in my digestive tract — all in the name of having doctors check out the ol' exhaust port. And yet, you're still getting a free newsletter relatively on time. Don't say I don't commit.

I don't just go to the cinema to see 85-year-old film noir; sometimes, I take in a picture that's been released in living memory. Such was the case with The Odyssey, which I took in the weekend prior to the medical contretemps I alluded to in my intro. A good thing, too, as I would not advise gulping down some polyethylene glycol 3350 before trying to sit through the two-hour, 53-minute run time of Christopher Nolan's latest.

My verdict? That Christopher Nolan knows how to shoot a picture. The themes of regret and trauma provide a compelling take on The Odyssey for modern audiences, and there are some very strong performances throughout the picture. (I was particularly taken with Anne Hathaway, an actor whose work doesn't always land with me, and let me be the 308th person to tell you that Samantha Morton leaves a lasting impression.) An episodic narrative is going to have its ups and downs — I could have done with a tighter telling of Telemachus' side-quest — but overall, an engaging time was had by all.

But that's not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about the hassle of actually seeing the movie.

The megaplex where we went to go see The Odyssey is part of a larger shopping district that only offers paid parking. But this isn't the type of parking lot where you hand over money to an attendant or even press a button and get a ticket that you later pay off upon departing the parking garage. Instead, you use an app — or if you don't want to install a single-purpose app on your phone, you use a kiosk where you enter in your stall number and payment information before hoping like hell that a receipt pops out that you can validate at the theater to save a little on the parking fee. A frictionless experience, this is not.

Anticipating large crowds for The Odyssey, we bought our tickets in advance. That meant clicking a link in an emailed receipt to get virtual tickets that I could download to my phone — only the wireless connectivity in the vicinity of the movie theater proved so spotty, it took several tries to download the tickets successfully.

Once in the theater and sitting in our seats, we were subjected to a steady stream of advertisements — and I'm referring to actual ads for goods and services as opposed to trailers for upcoming attractions. While the previews started when the movie was supposed to, the theater chain inserted ads every third or fourth trailer, including the one where Nicole Kidman appears to interrupt the anticipatory movie magic to tell us about how movies have the power to transport us.

Lady, I would LOVE to be transported, but someone keeps trying to sell me a Coke instead of showing me the movie I paid for.

Yes, Homer wrote of Odysseus's lengthy ordeal as he tried to find his way back to Ithaca, bedeviled by the gods at every turn. But I would submit that my attempt to watch The Odyssey was an ordeal in its own right, with much of the bedeviling done in the name of cutting costs even when unnecessary, then passing the diminished experience on to me and my fellow ticket-buyers.

It was thoroughly appropriate, then, that not long after seeing The Odyssey that I came across Danny Katch's "We used to be able to buy things in this country" essay. 

You probably saw it, too, as the story centers on how a visit to the drug store is now an enraging attempt to buy items locked behind plexiglass — items that used to be available for inspection before requiring the time commitment necessary to wait for an overworked clerk to come over and open a cabinet for you, then the awkward social moment of having to decide whether you're going to waste everyone's time by deciding that, on second thought, that middling liquid dispenser isn't what you were hoping to buy when you first began your vigil in the soap aisle twenty minutes ago.

The plexiglass sheets went up over store shelves ostensibly to stop a wave of shoplifting that was sweeping the nation five years ago. The shoplifting wave turned out to be made up, but retailers — and, more crucially, the private equity groups currently enshittifying them — aren't a self-reflective lot, even when their own anti-customer practices are turning shoppers off. 

'Tis better to keep the plexiglas up and save on labor costs than run a store people actually want to be in. Or as Katch puts it:

Even worse, this fact-free plexiglass indignity is now normalized throughout the retail/service industry, as illustrated by my cineplex adventure. My local Safeway now keeps its liquor under lock and key, so when I want to pick up a handle of bourbon, I've got to flag down one of the diminishing numbers of store employees. The same goes for toiletries, because who doesn't love feeling like they're checking into a SuperMax prison whenever their spouse asks them to pick up some cotton balls at the store?

I don't know what reverses this trend, short of businesses collapsing because they've made it so unpleasant to exchange money for goods or services. All I know is that the day those plexiglass barriers come down at your Walgreens and CVSes, it's going to feel like the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

Just as last week's newsletter was heading to your collective inboxes, my second App Spotlight column appeared at Six Colors. It's heavily focused on iOS apps this time around. We won't let that happen again.

On the podcast front, you've got another episode of Magnum, Podcast to enjoy, this time about a very silly episode even by Magnum, PI standards. I also appear on a new Lions, Towers & Shields installment, giving my opinion on Notorious. Strangely, that was an Alfred Hitchcock movie I had never watched up until now. It's good, but it doesn't crack the Top 5. (Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, Rope, The 39 Steps and Foreign Correspondent in case you were wondering.)

Do you have a podcast you'd like to gab on? Do you have an article you'd like me to write or edit? Do you just want to give me money because you're a square fellow? Drop me a line; I won't even make you stand behind a plexiglas barrier.

My wife figured I might be interested in this Wall Street Journal article on Disney pushing visitors to its various theme parks toward using its mobile app, even if it means constantly scrolling throughout their visit. My wife has apparently internalized all those times she catches me watching Disneyland videos on YouTube.

The thrust of the article is this: Disney has a Lightning Lanes add-on for its parks where you can pay up to skip the lines, or at least wait in much shorter lines than the hoi polloi. However, you have to book Lightning Lane times, which you do so through the app. And a lot of people game the system, by booking times and then flipping those reservations for better times on different rides, a process that requires you to stare at your phone nearly constantly. (For a look at how this works in practice, you can watch this Mammoth Club video on Lightning Lanes at Disneyland. And yes, the fact that the video is nearly 50 minutes tells you all you need to know about the complexity of the Lightning Lane process.)

As the Wall Street Journal puts it:

My last two Disneyland/Disney California Adventure visits offer a study in contrasts — one with the Lightning Lane add-on and one without. My Lightning Lane-free trip was one born out of stubbornness — after already paying hundreds of dollars to get me and my daughter into the park, I resolved to be damned if I was going to let Disney nickel-and-dime me — well, 20-and-50 me, to be more fiscally factual — out of even more money.

The result was a decent time, but one spent waiting in some very long lines while Lightning Lane passholders breezed by us. The most galling thing is that when a ride breaks down — and that happens at Disney parks with far greater frequency than it should — you are out of luck no matter how much time you waited in line. Lightning Lane holders at least get credited for a free pass when the ride comes back online. Score one for paying for the upsale.

Even worse, without the Lightning Lane, I still found myself having to whip out my phone to gauge ride wait times, peruse dining options and get other park info. The experience irritated me so much that I even wrote an article about it way back when.

I am sad to report the Lightning Lane experience at our next Disneyland visit went much better. Save for the Alice in Wonderland ride, we wound up riding everything we wanted to, including the Radiator Springs Racers and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance Rides that require an extra purchase on top of your Lightning Lane expenditure. (We wound up avoiding that upcharge by going single rider on Radiator Springs and sneaking on to Rise of the Resistance just before the park closed. I may have muttered suggestions on where Bob Iger could stick things on both occasions.)

My one consolation to paying for the Lightning Lane is that I didn't spend any time flipping around ride reservations like I was a commodities trader on the stock exchange floor. Instead, I spent the time taking in the experience and talking with my daughter. Which should really be the end goal, no?

We have both kinds of stories featured in this week's collection of links to things that have caught my attention — sports and non-sports. 

I've been watching Sugar, a detective show on Apple TV starring Colin Farrel, that's currently in its second season on the streamer. Having just wrapped up a Season 1 binge, I've just about caught up on the installments in Sugar's latest case.

Writing about Sugar requires some finesse, as there's a real significant spoiler that drops about three-quarters of the way through the first season. Since Sugar first debuted 2024, enough time has dropped so that the nature of the spoiler is out there if you want to find out. I'm going to try to write around it, but if you want to go into the show blind, you have my permission to bail until next week's newsletter.

For my part, I knew what the spoiler was going into Sugar, and I think that made me enjoy the show more — certainly more than people who felt blindsided by the twist. I can see where it would be jarring if you didn't know what was coming, even to the point where some people gave up on the show. By knowing how that one particular thing was going to unfold ahead of time, though, I could anticipate the twist and even appreciate the groundwork the creative team laid in the first five episodes. That said, it probably would have been better for all concerned if Sugar revealed its hand in episode two or three of Season 1.

I say that because now that the cat's out of the bag, Sugar is free to revel in what it does best in Season 2 — give us a modern spin on the L.A. detective story, with a really strong performance from Farrel. As someone who gobbles up any and all Philip Marlowe stories, counts The Long Goodbye as the best Robert Altman movie and mourns the fact that the planned Chinatown trilogy never panned out, you aren't going to have to twist my arm to make my like Sugar. A guy in a suit driving an old-timey car around Los Angeles, digging into its seedy underbelly. Yum, yum, more please. But I think Sugar builds on the formula by having something to say about outsiders trying to make sense of a setting where they're never fully at ease.

And that's your Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Please be sure and place this issue back behind the protective glass barrier where you found it. A clerk will be along to help you any moment now.