It’s 3:00 in the morning and you have to do things at 7:00. Everyone is asleep, including the person next to you, who nodded off seconds after the opening credits. The movie you just watched was either good, bad or mediocre. It makes no difference. None of it makes any damned difference because now you have to deal with your addiction, which is condemning you to another night in the lonely blue-lit world of dvd extras. You can explain that to a good movie the extras add complexity and that to a bad movie they provide a hilarious map of wrong turns and general movieland idiocy. But the truth is you’d watch them no matter what, for reasons you’ll never fully comprehend, because you’re sick, because there’s a piece of you missing, and you don’t know where it could have gone.

It’s Tuesday and this is the week of extras so far:

1) Old Joy by Kelly Reichardt, starring musician and actor Will Oldham. The extras are a mirror of the movie: they’re really good, even though nothing at all happens. Reichardt and the producer or something talk about filming in Oregon, the rain, the forests, the actors, her dog. It’s all commentary while the film is running. It’s poetic and informative and nice and it lasts all of about five minutes. Then it’s silent. As an addict, of course, you remain listening and therefore watching the movie all over again. But no one ever speaks again. The commentators are merely watching the movie too, transported by Oldham and the pine forests and the rain. Geez!

2) The Holiday by Nancy Meyers, starring Jack Black, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet. This thing was excruciatingly entertainingly bad, just as expected. This bomb underlined a fact that the extras confirmed: Hollywood mega-director and romantic-comedy ace Nancy Meyers is an idiot. Her magic formula is apparently to depend utterly on steeotype and cliche to convey the shiny joyous marvelousness of her sheltered fantasyland of a life. “LA is not Hollywood Boulevard to me. It’s lush, lush,” she says. Hence the Diaz character—the star of the movie and a fatuous movie-trailer maker—lives in a grotesquely “lush” wasteful mansion for one. You can feel the earth warming incrementally as each frame of the movie passes. The plot turns on the Diaz queen trading places with the Winslet character who is a lonely yuppie wedding writer for a UK newspaper. “The characters have completely opposite lives,” Meyers says. Except that no one in the movie has a “completely opposite” anything. Even Jack Black is driving around in a billion-dollar car. Why? These are Meyer’s “opposite lives”? How do you even say something that stupid? Guessing she forgot about the Hollywood Boulevard whores. Oh yeah.

3) A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Dito Montiel’s film-novel of a movie based on his memoir-story collection of a book. Dude, the reason this movie is good is because Montiel made it—that is, because he got the chance to make the movie himself even though the hacks were lining up all over the coasts to do their own moneymaking “treatments.” There is no formula. Even better is that it’s not merely a filmed book. It’s like he threw everything out but the feeling of the thing and his memories of Brooklyn. It’s a true visual/cinematic experience of the story and not like any other movie. How huge of an accomplishment. An artistic success in two tough media. Way to go, Dito. You wanna know at least one way to make a good movie? It’s there in the extras: you team an outsider vision with insider connections. Crazy ass-kicking Montiel had the right kind of friends, like consummate contemporary outside-insider Robert Downey Jr, who got everyone on board. The cast kills: Downey Jr, Rosario Dawson, Shia LaBeouf, Diane Weist, Chazz Palminteri, Anthony DeSando… These were the kind of extras that make it a hard habit to quit.