Port Hyperlink.

Film When I wrote my MA Film Studies dissertation about "hyperlink" films, as you might expect I had to watch a lot of them and although the process was mostly about analysing them looking for commonalities, pretty soon I did realise that some of them were better than others. Which is why I can just about agree with Nicholas Barber in today's G2 about how some films which would have worked perfectly well as portmantau films found themselves mixed and matched in unuseful ways:

"... prefer a good honest portmanteau. It’s less tricksy than a hyperlink film. Every section has to stand or fall on its own merits, as well as complement the whole. If one segment doesn’t entertain, it risks being cut out: the other segments will survive without it. Sub-Altman hyperlink films, on the other hand, can use their constant back-and-forthing to disguise the weakness of the individual strands. You don’t get such shilly-shallying from Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, where every gruesome story packs a punch and has a twist to remember. Great title, too."

But as I researched my dissertation, one of the questions I had to deal with in relation to considering if this was a genre and what its tropes might be was what the "pleasures" might be for the audience, the repeated element that people look for. In hyperlink films this is the moment when you realise how the people are connected, that two characters you've been following are actually (sorry) siblings or married or co-workers or whatever something which often doesn't happen until deep into the film causing you to re-evaluate what you've seen before.  Todd Solondz is a master of this - Happiness being the primary example.  Oddly, he doesn't pention Paris J'Taime which brilliantly is a portmantau film, until it isn't.