Hollywood Elsewhere is jetting to Houston today and four or five days at Worldfest, a longstanding local-flavored film festival with interesting shadings. A slight interruption in WIRED postings, yes…but only for a few hours.

An amusing N.Y. Times story by Bill Carter about the creation of Rob Burnett‘s Let’s Rob Mick Jagger series.

Tom Cruise was “at his best, and most unlikable, as the misogynistic self-help guru Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Magnolia,” writes MSNBC’s Eric Lundegaard. “Here’s the fascinating part. As he was being interviewed by the female reporter, and glared at her warily through a big tight grin, the character seemed only a step or two removed from the Cruise character we see promoting his latest film on entertainment shows. That is: spooky.” I alluded to the same thing when I wrote on 4.19 about Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible III, to wit: “He’s made Hunt into a kind of mirror image of hard-core tabloid Tom. Hunt is a ‘character,’ yes, but based more than ever on the pumping piston rods of Cruise’s personality. A guy who’s all about focus, juice, intensity, endorphins. Plotting strategy, eyeballing his costars, running for his life (in more ways than one) and turning tomato red in the face. Neck veins! Neck veins!”

Horror films have reinvigorated the movie business. Great. Break out the champagne. Only people who have next to no interest in the transcendent power of great movies, who see them only as dollars-and-cents delivery devices , would take any comfort from this. I’ve always liked good horror films, but c’mon…

A just-launched site for Richard Linklater‘s A Scanner Darkly , which will play at the Cannes Film Festival.

“I just saw Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette,” says a French film critic whose name I should probably keep under wraps. “Empty shell, boring as hell. Don’t know if the Cannes jury is gonna buy it, but the average moviegoer will suffer deeply watching gilded 18th-Century types people get bored, eat, drink, and get bored again. Movies about boredom and filling spaces are tricky to film. Coppola did it right with Lost in Translation, but this time she fails completely, in my opinion. You were right about the parallel between Marie Antoinette and the Paris Hilton crowd . It’s here. The rock soundtrack works in the beginning, but quickly turns into a gimmick that doesn’t hold for two hours.”

Research is saying that audiences aren’t that interested in Vince Vaughn playing a quasi-romantic lead, which is what he’s trying to be in The Breakup. They prefer him as a non-romantic hound- dog motor-mouth, as he was in last summer’s Wedding Crashers. I think most of us knew that going in.

A friend told me the other night that Paul Bettany had thought up a simple way to keep papparazzi from taking his picture…or any celebrity’s picture if, say, they’re at a film festival or staying in some small vacation village and they want to be left alone. Wear the same outfit every day. Photographers won’t snap you two days in a row if you’re wearing the same clothes because it’ll look the photos taken on day #1, and editors won’t run them. Brilliant! The hitch, of course, is that humble selfless types like Angelina Jolie and/or Jennifer Aniston wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the same duds two or three days in a row.

A sidewalk observer described Poseidon star Josh Lucas as looking “bloated” the other night in Manhattan, according to N.Y. Daily News “Lowdown” columnist Lloyd Grove . Lucas “was with a group of guy friends [and] looked like he was out for a night on the town, and like he’d been out quite a few nights in a row.” This is a sign, a harbinger…an indication of Poseidon sentiment among the media.

Catherine Zeta Jones: a capitalist first and foremost, and an actress, wife, mom and everything else second.

Seventeen reviews so far of United 93 and it’s got a 92% positive and a 100% creme de la creme ratings. Will RV, which is apparently opening in a lot more theatres, do more business than United 93 this weekend? Quantitively, possibly. (And that in itself is depressing enough.) But if it does more on a per-screen basis…I don’t want to go there.

Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper on United 93…very well said. Ebert: “All the time the military is looking for authorization and trying to find the President, trying to find the President. And I don’t know about you but all I could think about was that moment in Fahrenheit 9/11…” He means that footage of Bush sitting on a chair in front of the grade-school class, reading from “My Pet Goat” and basically doing nothing while crucial minutes ticked by.