Syriana and the idea of "hyperlink films"

I finally rented the movie Syriana from Netflix. I watched half of it late at night before I fell asleep, then watched the rest the next day. As a result, I experienced the movie as a semi-dream. But that seems absolutely appropriate for this particular film. It's a movie with a complicated plot, multiple story lines, a lot of characters who looked similar, deliberatve confusions, no easy connect-the-dots resolution. Phillip Dhingra made this great page, with a map to help sort out the connections.
When I went to IMdb, as I usually do these days to learn more about a film, I came across Roger Ebert's review in which he calls this a "hypertext movie". A little more poking around led me to a post that explained that the term had been coined by a critic Alissa Quart in the journal Film Comment to describe a certain type of complex, multi-stranded film. Ebert says:
"The movie belongs to a genre that has been named "hyperlink cinema" by the critic Alissa Quart, in Film Comment. She suggests the structure was invented by Robert Altman, and Altman certainly brought it into modern times and made it particularly useful for showing interlocking stories in a world where lives seem to crash into each other heedlessly. "Crash," indeed, is an example of the genre, as are Altman's "The Player" and "Short Cuts," and such films as "Traffic," "Syriana," "City of God," "Amores Perros" and "Nine Lives." Ebert loved Syriana, and I thought it was interesting that he said he gave himself up to the pleasure of the unresolved connections because the film still made a different kind of sense to him; not the sense of narrative closure, where all the points are connected, but the sense that there is a set of connections that the characters themselves don't perceive, and that we can only glimpse in flashes even as the force of the movie sweeps us along.

Blogger Jason Kottke picked up on Ebert's review and the notion of hyperlink cinema. The comments to his post make some very good points: this type of structure is actually pretty much what a lot of modernist fiction pioneered: John Dos Passos USA for example, or even Charles Dickens: multiple plot lines, flashbacks and parallel stories, the kinds of "dissolves" in the discourse that propel us from one "reality" to another without the usual realist transitional signals.
And it was certainly what Rayuela by Julio Cortazar attempted to do in a much more self-conscious way: point out to the reader that jumping around from chapter to chapter, almost, but not quite, at random, was as valid a way to read as cover-to-cover. I need to follow up on this!