Hana hou, 2008!

As a new year begins on a hopeful note, here’s a fond look back at some of the places we went in this space in the year just ended.

Movie award season is turning out to be a time of diminishing returns. The more of the so-called “prestige” film I see, the worse I feel. Could it be that the reason it’s so hard to spot the best picture of 2007 is because there isn’t one? (Jan. 3)

Maybe it’s a mark of my new maturity, but the big band blare and cutesy lyrics on Scott Sherley’s “Stardust Memories” on Mana’o Radio don’t seem so rinky-dink anymore. In fact, these geriatric hit parade relics are sounding almost visionary, like little glimpses of New Age awareness, well before their time. (Jan. 10)

Whale watches are something you never tire of, even after they start lending themselves to a “Far Side” perspective. From the whales’ point of view, they’re people watches. I can just see a Gary Larson cartoon in which a couple of whales eye a nearby vessel. “It’s easy to train that kind of animal to do tricks,” says one whale. “Watch me make them run from one side of the boat to the other.” (Jan. 17)

Is this to become the next movie genre — sick flicks — about baby-boomers facing serious illness? I hope not. But in this week of downbeat Academy Award nominations (call them crit flicks) and the tragic news of Heath Ledger’s death, we can at least take heart from the four nominations for “Juno.” (Jan. 24)

The Maui Polar Bear Fin Swim is a mixed metaphor — a New Year’s swim in the Pacific tropics in which swimmers are invited to use fins, appendages that having nothing to do with polar bears. Organizers call it the only sane polar bear swim on the planet. I have my doubts. (Jan. 31)

As holidays go, the Super Bowl is somewhere between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. It’s probably a more accurate gauge than either of them of what we — we guys, at least — hold dear. Besides beer. (Feb. 7)

Lion dances for Chinese New Year are part of the stew of all the ethnicities grouped together under the convenient but misleading label, “Hawaiian culture.” The lions and the drums and the cymbals tap into some primal place in us to get our mojos revved up for a new year. (Feb. 14)

Talking about newspapers — which are less and less about news actually on paper — you could say, The Times has changed. Forget that old staple and noble foundation of newspapering, the daily deadline. In the 24-hour news cycle, the news never stands still. Like novices in a shooting gallery, we journalists keep trying to hit the moving targets in the never-ending now. (Feb. 28)

Artist Tom Sewell’s mammoth, multimedia “Enigma of the Mill” in Schaefer Gallery at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, pushed the envelope of video technology, turning agriculture into art, mill labor into ballet, welding arcs into brushstrokes and machinery into sculpture. (March 6)

The culture of Hawaii is a multi-ethnic place of mixing, where family geneologies become like the United Nations, and deep knowledge of any one culture is a pathway to knowing all cultures. The culture of Hawaii has, at least in most of our lifetimes, been about giving and sharing, realizing what we have in common as members of the same human family. Without that, there really isn’t much cause for celebration. (On The Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua Celebration of the Arts, March 27)

During my week in Tulsa, there were tornado alerts, lightning that turned midnight white, rumbling thunder that felt like it was in bed with you, winds that ripped roofs off warehouses and floods that put the nearby town of Broken Arrow under enough water to summon Noah. (April 17)

Considering that they’re well into their 60s now, it’s hard to explain the lingering impulse to refer to the Rolling Stones as boys. They’re walking — or in Mick Jagger’s case, running, jumping, dancing, prancing — refutations of conventional wisdom about clean living. Instead, they are poster boys for the residual health benefits of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Especially the latter. (April 24)
A lot of what passes for the ’60s actually took place in the ’70s. There are still little corners of Paia and isolated ravines in Haiku where the ’60s are still happening as we speak. Apart from that, the ’70s   really were pretty forgettable. They were like pleasant anasthesia after all the revolution and renaissance hubbub of the ’60s— sort of a soothing haze with a good dance beat. That’s what the Chicago concert at the MACC was like, too. (May 1)

“Iron Man,” the surprisingly likable first really big hit of the summer, has made more than $100 million, plus another $100 million worldwide, since it opened last weekend. It’s the rare case where the superhero isn’t so much jet-propelled as character-driven, showing we’ve come full circle as far as superheroes are concerned. (May 8)

When they started turning their boyhood film fantasies into their own movies, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg couldn’t dream of how much and how fast things would change. The technology they glorified was mechanical — planes with propellers, clunky armored cars — but their technology was increasingly digital. They were alchemists freeing the genie from the silicon lantern. (May 22)

What this new “Indiana Jones” mostly seems to be about is that Harrison Ford is 65 now. Director Steven Spielberg and writer-producer George Lucas are just a few years short of that. Come to think of it, so am I. Like “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s glorious Rolling Stones concert film, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” demonstrates what lengths some guys will go to not to act their age. (May 29)

“You’ve got to be in it for the fun of making movies. I’m fortunate enough to be working in my dream. It’s because I never outgrew playing dress-up. It’s my passion and it’s my sandbox — I bring my shovel and pirate suit.” (Virginia Madsen, Navigator Award recipient at the Maui Film Festival at Wailea, June 5)

The Maui Film Festival at Wailea all sprang from one imagination. It’s a text book example of “the vision thing.” I picture the inside of Barry Rivers’ head like a pinball machine. A lit-up hula girl dances on the backboard as Barry’s ideas careen back and forth off the rails at warp speed, from the beach to the volcano, from the sand to the stars. (June 19)
Plastic is moving up the food chain. We know this by autopsies performed on albatrosss stomachs in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands. We respond to this with plastic awareness. The question in the checkout line now is paper, plastic … or what? Except, invariably, you have left your earth-friendly cloth bag in the back seat out in the parking lot. Still, I’m now a no-bag guy, like a balancing clown in a circus, zigzagging with my precarious pyramid of stuff, looking like someone flunking a DUI test, trying not to drop anything en route to the truck.  (July 3)

Turning to comic books for our cultural heroes has always felt a little dumb to me. It seemed like we could aim higher. Then I realized superheroes have been around since the beginning of myth and mythology. They just used to be called gods.  (July 10)

Some critics are already hailing Heath Ledger’s performance in “The Dark Knight” for an Oscar. But that’s not what’s bringing the crowds to the theater. It is, instead, Ledger’s tragic and well-publicized death. Which makes that $150 million opening weekend — ka-ching — feel like a price on his head as it transforms those huge audiences into ghoulish gawkers at a car crash. (July 24)

The notion that a superbly conditioned athlete who comes in last in a race is somehow a “loser” may be how the Olympics are played —but the game of life is different. Unlike the Visa commercials, life accepts everything. There’s honor in the courage it takes just to make it to the starting line, to sacrifice everything for a dream, to take your chances, to risk losing it all in a second that will last the rest of your life. (Aug. 21)

Women may have a really hard time understanding themselves, but guys — even champs like Woody Allen and Hugh Hefner who have devoted their lives to the subject of women — don’t even know where to begin. (Aug. 28)

Not long after Hawaii became a state, the hippies started arriving. This moment in history is vividly captured in a new documentary, “Taylor Camp,” from the creative team behind “Bhutan” — producer John Wehrheim, director Robert Stone and fellow Maui filmmaker Tom Vendetti. (Sept. 4)
A curious fact of modern life is the way it keeps getting harder to find the line between what we call entertainment and what we call reality. This political season may mark the watershed when we stop trying. (Sept. 11)

The “great experiment” of America was created by men — men only — in white whigs and knee britches for whom the latest technology was probably a new buggy harness or monkey-teeth dentures. They were gambling that the residents of the new republic would take the responsibilities to be informed citizens seriously. If they could have seen the way smart technology could make people dumber, they might have wondered if democracy was really such a good idea after all. (Sept. 18)

“I have had a wonderful life. Acting is like a sidelight for me. You learn your lines, you don’t bump into the furniture. They pay you well in Hollywood, enough to pay the bills.” (Anthony Hopkins, attending the opening of his art exhibit at Higgins Harte International Gallery, Sept. 25)

As fine an actor as he was, Paul Newman’s greatest quality felt like the opposite of acting. For all of us who only knew him as light projected larger than life on a screen, he enlarged our sense of what it means to be human — even as he kept raising the bar for us all to try to be better at it. (Oct. 2)

“Kahekili,” the made-on-Maui hula drama that has toured the Mainland and Europe, makes you relate to its subject not as a historical footnote or emblem of an exotic race of people, but more like National League baseball star and St. Anthony grad Shane Victorino — a hometown hero. (Oct. 16)

After Sarah Palin’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” the consensus was that the self-described “Caribou Barbie” was definitely qualified … to be on “Saturday Night Live.” Amidst such lingering questions of who’s qualified to be what, it feels like the real legacy of the last eight years has less to do with “W.’s” intelligence than with his effect on everyone else’s.  (Oct. 23)

Funny thing about Te Vaka. The group’s songs come from Tokelau, Tuvala, Samoa and the Cook Islands by way of New Zealand, but listening to the musical exuberance, catching the pulsing beat, you start feeling like you know the words.  (Oct. 30)

“What can they do to me?” (Clint Eastwood, being interviewed at a past Maui Film Festival at Wailea, about his desire to try out some new ways of telling stories on screen, Nov. 6)

Barack Obama isn’t the first black president of the United States. Black presidents started appearing on movie and TV screens in 1933. He’s just the first real one. (Nov. 13)

“Every so often in an article or an interview, someone describes me as ‘fearless.’ In my opinion, that’s like calling me an idiot. Fear is a natural response. Without it, we wouldn’t survive.” (Big wave surf legend and new author Laird Hamilton, Nov. 20)
   
“Twilight’s” pair are not unlike the most star-crossed lovers in history, but they fare somewhat better than Shakespeare’s duo. In Romeo and Juliet’s day, nobody was thinking about sequels. (Nov. 27)

Vacationing on Lanai several years ago, award-winning stage and screen director Julie Taymor had a vision. “It was a bit of an epi- phany,” said film producer Lynn Hendee. Taymor felt she had seen an island that would be perfect for the film version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” She was attracted to the “magical, beautiful and surreal” aspect of the island. “It’s Shakespeare’s most magical play. There will be no palm trees in the picture.” (Dec. 11)

Why are so many actors who play super-powered visitors to our planet named Reeve — or something similar? Pure coincidence?  Or is that the word for alien in their language? Keanu Reeves plays  Klaatu in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” He’s an alien but looks enough like a normal guy to slip unnoticed among us. Don’t you hate it when that happens? (Dec. 18)

As opposed to last year’s bleak Oscar field, this one has little rays of hope shining through the dark clouds. Hope’s been going around lately.  (Dec. 25)

• Wishing you all the best of new years. Contact Rick Chatenever at scene@mauinews.com