Keep in mind that the usable exposure latitude of film far outstrips digital. Digital specs are not to be believed, the highs and lows are not usable. When those digital highlights get blown out they stay blown out, not so w/ film.
This is about 10 years out of date. For all intents and purposes, given the rarity of 12+ stop scenes, they're effectively equal-- if you don't try to shoot them the same. In bright light here in Florida, it's rare that a scene has a range of more than about 10 stops.
With film, you want to preserve shadow detail-- so you meter for the shadows, and worry less about the highlights. On digital, as momus says, once you hit max value, there is no more data to acquire, so you tend to meter for the highlights, knowing that the shadow detail can always be boosted a bit.
But reality is, retrieving data from shadows
or highlights will result in less than satisfactory results for both film and digital.
I haven't seen anyone mention polarizers-- how effective are they for controlling unwanted highlights on film? I assume as much as they are for digital, so I'm surprised they haven't come up in the thread.