Netflix and Film Independent got a jump on the deluge of independent filmmaking news that will be coming soon via Sundance by announcing a new independent film contest today that will be chaired by Josh Brolin and judged by Brolin, Dan Jinks, Bruce Cohen, and Dustin Lance Black.

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• Ben Stiller is replacing Mark Ruffalo as the male lead in Noah Baumbach’s comedy-drama Greenburg, which has also just lost female lead Amy Adams. Between this and the news that Stiller’s directing The Trial of the Chicago 7, it appears he’s headed for a more serious course. If so, he should try and get that Zoolander sequel made before he becomes the next Tom Hanks. Joking aside, though, this could be good for those of us who prefer his performances in Permanent Midnight and Your Friends and Neighbors.
• Hollywood is making yet another apocalyptic alien invasion movie, yet the latest, a comic book adaptation called Atlantis Rising, involves a threat from beneath the ocean. Obviously, it’s labeled a cross between two James Cameron films, Aliens and The Abyss.
• Oliver Stone’s latest documentary about a controversial world leader will focus on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who he’s been filming for six months. There’s also rumor that he’ll follow that up with a doc on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
• Speaking of Stone, for those who wished Will Ferrell had played the lead in W., HBO is airing a live telecast of Ferrell’s upcoming Broadway show You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George Bush. The date of the telecast is still unrevealed, but it’s likely to be in March.
• Oscar ratings in France should be huge this year, because Jerry Lewis has been named to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards.

Who would you rather hear sing Etta James’ signature tunes, the real deal or Beyonce Knowles? If you prefer the latter, then you’ll want to see Cadillac Records and even buy the film’s soundtrack, both of which feature Beyonce performing a few of James’ songs, including a nearly spot-on copy of “At Last” (listen to it here). Other actors in the film (and on the soundtrack) who do their own singing while portraying legendary music artists include Jeffrey Wright (as Muddy Waters), Mos Def (Chuck Berry) and Columbus Short (Little Walter).

It’s a strange idea to pay tribute to a singer with a biopic or ensemble music historical and then replace that singer’s voice with another, more amateur vocalist. Yet Hollywood does it all the time and, surprisingly, the new performances usually turn out pretty good. Just listen to the following nine actors and actresses who managed to do justice to the artist they were portraying.
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It’s more difficult to be convincing as a real person when acting on film than on the stage. The camera can get closer and your image ends up projected many times larger than life size. So, despite giving a Tony Award-winning performance as Richard Nixon in the theater version of Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella was not initially thought of as worthy to reprise the role in Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the play. Part of it was that he’s not a big name, but another reason was that he looks nothing like Tricky Dick.

Ultimately, Langella did get the part, and while he doesn’t resemble the former president, he apparently does a bang up job in the role. But the transition could easily have been as awkward as Ralph Bellamy’s reprisal of his Tony-winning portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. In the film version of that play, Bellamy’s vocal impersonation comes off more like a Scottish brogue (he sounds exactly like Sean Connery, in fact) than FDR’s signature “Locust Valley lockjaw.”  Instead, Langella is on track for an Oscar nomination, and is sure to join the following actors who also gave convincing performances as world leaders.

As a handicap, SpoutBlog has limited the selections to modern era leaders whose real persona exists on film/tape and are therefore more easily comparable to actors’ representations.
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It’s already been called the most important civil rights film of the decade, but only time will tell if Milk has any real impact on the gay marriage issue or any other related civil rights matter. Obviously the film, which is set thirty years in the past, can be appropriated by the campaign to overturn Proposition 8, but if that campaign is successful, it will be difficult to prove with certainty Milk contributed to the end result.

The Birth of a Nation may have inspired a reformation of the Ku Klux Klan and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may have opened some minds to wider acceptance of interracial marriage (which had just recently been legalized). However, as Time magazine reported earlier this year, it’s quite rare for cinema to really change the world. A movie like Philadelphia easily gets moviegoers thinking about AIDS and discrimination, for instance, and Sicko exposes some of the supposed benefits of universal health care, yet most of these kinds of message films preach primarily to the choir.

But at least five films have made an actual difference, either on a local or national level. Will Milk join the small group of movies detailed below?
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It happened last year for Cate Blanchett. The actress starred in a biopic that critics ripped to shreds, a film that basically bombed at the (American) box office, and yet she managed to score a Best Actress nomination for her reprised performance as the titular monarch of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Additionally, Blanchett earned another nomination for Best Supporting Actress the same year, for her portrayal of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Now Josh Brolin could achieve a similar feat this year, not just by earning separate nominations for playing the titular president of W. and portraying politician-turned-assassin Dan White in Milk, but also by overcoming the difficulty of earning recognition in a lead category for a film that otherwise is not very well regarded. Are Brolin’s hurdles higher than Blanchett’s, though? With all the praise he’s received for W., he’s still far from being considered a sure thing candidate, regardless of his worthiness or the Academy’s history of oftentimes ignoring the critics and the grosses when nominating dependable, standout actors.

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When it was announced that David Wain would be directing Role Models — taking over from The Girl Next Door’s Luke Greenfield — there was room for disappointment. After all, for Wain to follow up his anarchic cult favorites Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten with a seemingly mainstream man-child comedy — one more suited to the talents of Todd Phillips or, well, Greenfield — was to crush his fans’ hopes for something more along the lines of his wacky web series, such as Wainy Days and Stella, or the old MTV sketch comedy show, The State.

But Role Models does look funny, probably because Wain ended up rewriting (with Paul Rudd and Ken Marino) Timothy Dowling’s original script. And it’s not as if Wain has suddenly gone and sold out with a bunch of really broad family films, as did his former State mates Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the screenwriting duo behind The Pacifier, Night at the Museum and Taxi. Still, many of us are holding out for that rumored State movie, or even better, a big screen adaptation of any of the following State sketches:

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Are you walking around with your “I Voted!” sticker proudly adhered to your chest? If not, get out there and do some lever pulling, chad punching, and ballot dropping. Then take the rest ofthe day off and watch one of these movies that’ll get you through the rest of election day and away from the nail-biting edge of election return coverage. There are a few minor spoilers inside, but don’t view that as me messing with the ballot box. You’ll still love the movies more than CNN’s infographics.

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On Monday night, The Hollywood Reporter published a story questioning Focus Features’ marketing plan for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic on the country’s first openly gay elected official who was famously assassinated by a colleague in the late 70s. The story suggested that by “keeping its awards contender out of fall fests and heavily restricting media screenings,” the studio is deliberately trying to avoid any kind of partisan publicity (positive or negative) that could damage the film from reaching a mainstream audience.

Focus chief James Schamus was, apparently, pretty upset by the story, particularly considering that it was timed to hit the web just under 24 hours before Milk’s premiere, a benefit screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. He’s written a letter to the editor of THR, which Eugene Hernandez posted on his blog last night before the Milk screening. The gist: Milk wasn’t ready in time for fall festivals, they don’t have enough prints yet to do widespread screening but they will, the entire internet has been going batshit crazy for the trailer (”probably the most inspiring piece of movie marketing about genuine (as well as out) politics ever created”) for over a month, and not only has Focus not avoided political attention but they’ve bought tons of ad space on The Huffington Post and NPR.

If the issue was whether or not Focus is actively trying to create “noise” around Milk, then Schamus’ defense seems solid enough to lead to the conclusion that THR got that part of the story wrong. But the issue might not be the quantity of noise, but the brand of noise.

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It’s debatable whether it’s one of the film’s major strengths or its fatal flaw, but there’s no denying that Oliver Stone’s W. is loaded with actual quotes and dramatizations of documented events. But as if they were anticipating an argument over the film’s factual basis anyway, Lionsgate has set up a companion web site called the W. Film Guide, which essentially breaks the movie down into 83 footnotes.

These notes basically serve three purposes:

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This past weekend, Saturday Night Live received a huge ratings boost thanks to the appearance of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. But as much fun as it was seeing her act the good sport next to a jokingly critical Alec Baldwin, it only made me anticipate her inevitable feature film debut. I mean, did you notice she was the only person who didn’t need to keep reading from the cue cards? She’s a natural. And whether her ticket wins or loses the race on November 4, it’s certain that one day Palin will at least make a cameo in some kind of fictional movie, whether she means to or not.

So, as we wait for her to show up in a small part in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (both because she’s from Alaska and reminds me of Frances McDormand in Fargo), let’s take a look at some other politicians who’ve made interesting film cameos, some intentionally and some not.

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• Fox was the bread in a Chihuahua sandwich this weekend, as estimates place the studio’s two new releases at #1 and #3 on the box office chart. 20th Century Fox’s Max Payne made $18 million while Fox Searchlight’s The Secret Life of Bees earned just over $11 million, which was very, very close to Beverly Hills Chihuahua’s second-placing $11.2 million. Coming in fourth place, which in terms of the sandwich metaphor makes it a pickle, was Oliver Stone’s W. with a close $10.6 million. The discarded turkey, meanwhile, was Sex Drive, which placed ninth with only $3.6 million.
• Not enough of a turkey, however, that the Sex Drive writing-directing team of John Morris and Sean Anders couldn’t make a deal for their next project, a college comedy about an accidental father.
• Citing creative differences, Hugh Grant has exited the movie biz-set romantic comedy Lost for Words, which would have seen him play opposite Ziyi Zhang as an actor who falls for his director despite a language barrier. Now hopes of a life-imitates-art romance between Grant and Danish director Susanne Bier have been shattered.
• Killer Films is producing a movie involving the 1944 meeting of Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Keroac. Too bad David Cross, who hilariously portrayed Ginsberg in Killer’s I’m Not There is probably too old to reprise the role.
• I’m still waiting for the day a remake of Troop Beverly Hills is announced, but for now the similar-sounding Tough Cookies will just have to suffice. The family film will be about a deadbeat dad who leads an unconventional group of girl scouts, who compete against snobbish rivals at the National Scout Rally.

At various turns, Abraham Lincoln (1930), D.W. Griffith’s first and most notorious sound film, comes off as the legendary director’s W.– the story of a simple, silly good ole boy’s rise to the U.S. Presidency. Walter Huston portrays young Abe as a tough but bumbling doof, romantic daydreamer and idle underachiever. Even his bride-to-be, Mary Todd, curses him as a “country baboon” at one point. But the rest of the film illustrates every last Honest Abe tall tale. Well, in that sense, it’s a lot like W., too: When in presidential mode, Huston’s Lincoln is as uncanny a reproduction of a national myth as Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush is of a national disgrace.

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• Brad Pitt will produce and may star in an outer space version of The Odyssey for Warner Bros., and the studio is looking to sign George Miller as director. It is indeed an interesting project for Pitt since he also starred in Troy, which was kind of an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad. But even more interesting is the fact that this isn’t the first Odyssey in space movie announced this week. On Monday, Ridley Scott described his next project as “The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner.”
• Pitt may also play Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (labeled one of the “New Einsteins” in the latest Mental_Floss) in an adaptation of the nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game from screenwriter Steve Zaillian (American Gangster) and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada).
• Star Wars geek Kevin Smith is at last making his own sci-fi movie, a father-son comedy set in outer space that “will reference other sci-fi movies.” Hopefully it will be as good as Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest, but looking at both the history of sci-fi comedies and the Bluntman and Chronic stuff at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back leaves me thinking it will be more 2001: A Space Travesty.
• It’s that time of the year when studios decide if their Oscar hopefuls are ready or not. Dimension is currently weighing the possibility of The Road being pushed to 2009, and now Paramount has announced that expected contender The Soloist won’t be released until March while Defiance will barely make the calendar cut with a limited drop on December 31.
• On this crowded news day, here are some other notable bits: David Bergstein is consolodating several companies, including THINKfilm and Capitol Films, for a new venture headed by former New Line exec David Tuckerman;  F. Gary Gray replaces Frank Darabont as director of Law-Abiding Citizen; Bourne 4 moves ahead with a screenwriter; Max Payne is expected to be #1 at the box office this weekend, unless of course some figures from Florida are miscounted permitting Oliver Stone’s W. to win the top spot.