2B — Thursday, February 5, 2015
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

TRAILER REVIEW

A little late for the Oscars, 

SpongeBob resurfaces on the 
big 
screen 

in his sec-
ond 
feature 

film: 
“The 

Sponge-
Bob 
Movie: 

Sponge Out 
of Water.” An 
evil 
pirate, 

played 
by 

Antonio 
Banderas 
(“Spy Kids”) 
(he’s back! and not in boots!), 
lays siege to Bikini Bottom to 
recover the final page of a book 
that will makes true whatever 
the author writes in its page. 
SpongeBob must go (ahem) out 
of water and into 3D animation 
to save the day.

Perhaps due to his spongy 

resilience, Spongebob has man-
aged to stay relevant to almost 
two generations of cartoon 
fans. Most Nickelodeon car-
toon shows come and go (e.g., 
“Rocko’s Modern Life”), but 
SpongeBob has merrily abided 
on the sunken shores of Bikini 

Bottom for nearly 16 years.

Unfortunately, 
either 

SpongeBob 
has 
changed 

or 
I 
have, 
because 
Mr. 

SquarePants 
doesn’t 
seem 

to have the same appeal as 
before: His yellow seems less 
yellow, his bubble obsession 
less hilarious, his steady job 
as fry cook a little bit weird. 
I’m left asking the questions 
I was too innocent to ask 
before: Why has SpongeBob, 
who’s apparently an adult, 
been working as a fry cook for 
16 years? Does Patrick have a 

mental disability? Does Squid-
ward suffer from depression?

Luckily, this motion pic-

ture isn’t aiming to please 
jaded college students like 
myself. It’s geared toward 
kids for whom SpongeBob is 
still new(ish); and for them, 
Patrick’s caveman stupidity, 
Squidward’s killjoy attitude, 
Gary’s meowing and Sponge-
Bob’s, 
well, 
squarepanted-

ness will be as funny and 
enjoyable as ever … Oh, and 
this time it’s in 3D!

-ZAK WITUS

C+

‘The 
SpongeBob 
Movie: 
Sponge Out 
of Water’

Paramount Animation

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW

Rihanna is having a moment. 

She knows we’ve been a col-
lective nervous wreck waiting 
for her return to music, for the 
official 
start 

of 
the 
#R8 

era. Rihanna, 
aware of the 
fact that she 
has our atten-
tion, is letting 
herself have a 
moment. And 
that moment 
is 
“FourFi-

veSeconds.”

There’s 

a 
lot 
that 

feels 
oddly 

unexplained about this whole 
“FourFiveSeconds” thing: the 
grand departure in sound it rep-
resents for her, what it means for 
the rest of her imminent eighth 
album, what Paul McCartney 
is doing there, what the song is 
even about. The accompanying 
music video, released on Tues-
day, doesn’t do much to address 
the elephant in the room, 
though — what the fuck does 
Rihanna have up her sleeve?

Whatever is up there must 

be quite big, considering how 
baggy the vintage Sean John 
denim jacket (which, some-
what unsurprisingly, belongs to 
Kanye) is that she’s sporting in 
the clip. Directed by the famed 
Dutch duo of Inez van Lam-
sweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, 
who are known for their highly 
posed fashion photography, the 
“FourFiveSeconds” music video 
was shot completely in black 
and white using a square aspect-
ratio, perfect for @badgalriri’s 
Instagram account.

The video features the trio of 

denim-clad iconic artists using 
exaggerated hand and body ges-
tures to convey their feelings in 
front of a strategically-lit white 
backdrop, all the while looking 
quite beautiful themselves. The 
most striking points of the video 
are the tightly-shot close-ups 
of Rihanna and Kanye looking 
directly into the camera with a 
look that combines scorn with 
confidence, fear with excite-
ment. There’s a twinkle in 
their eyes — they know we’re 
part confused, part intrigued 
and part excited by the whole 
thing. What Inez and Vinoodh 
have created here is something 
special, and it’s very much in 
line with the sound of Kanye’s 
“Only One,” as well as with his 
Kardashian-induced obsession 
with high fashion. But, what 
remains (perhaps purposively) 
unclear is what is all means for 
Rihanna and the trajectory of 
this new era.

“FourFiveSeconds” 
has 

grown on me in ways I 
wouldn’t have expected, and 

the music video probably will, 
too. But my favorite moment 
from the entire video hap-
pens just eighteen seconds in 
after Rihanna sings “I might 
do a little time” as she looks 
directly at us, her powerful 
stare piercing the camera. 
After a pause, she rolls her 
eyes hard. Part of what’s great 
about this moment is that it 
sort of reflects my feelings 
about “FourFiveSeconds:” I’m 
entertained, I’m enjoying it, 
but I’m also kind of over it. I 
want to see what’s next. The 
other reason that this moment 
stands out is because it’s just 
that — a moment — and it’s 
one that reassures us that 
the Rihanna we love — the 
fierce, unapologetic RiRi that 
doesn’t give a shit about what 
anyone thinks — is ready to 
return. It’s a flash of brilliance 
that allows us to be okay with 
indulging her in this moment, 
just as long as it only lasts 
about four or five seconds.

-GIBSON JOHNS

B+

‘FourFive 
Seconds’

Rihanna, 
Kanye West 
and Paul 
McCartney

Roc Nation

PARAMOUNT ANIMATION

ROC NATION

National Harbor, Md. — “WEL-

COME BACK, BRO! WELCOME 
BACK 
TO 
THE 
BIG 
DICK 

PARTY!”

Less than two minutes after 

checking into the convention and 
getting my badge, two very drunk 
and very happy geeks had their 
arms around me.

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
I looked over to where the two 

lanky fellows were walking. Sev-
eral other inebriated gamers were 
hammering away at gamepads, 
huddled in front of 20-inch HD 
monitors.

I was hoping it would be longer 

before the MAGFest culture shock 
set in. I had three newcomers with 
me (my girlfriend and two of my 
best friends), and I wanted their 
transition into convention culture 
to be smoother than it was. Per-
haps a subtler welcome wagon to 
a first con experience than two 
touchy-feely “Guilty Gear” players 
would have been nice.

“MAGFest is so many things to 

so many different people. I some-
times like to say that MAGFest 
doesn’t exist, there are actually 15 
events going on at the same time 
in the same building” said Nicho-
las Marinelli, the promotions and 
public relations official of MAG-
Fest.

“My business card says ‘promo-

tions and public relations,’ but real-
ly, it’s everything. MAGFest has a 
very flat organizational structure; 
it’s not very deep hierarchically. 
I’m on the Board of Directors; I’m 
the only one that really does the 
promo.”

The Music and Games Festival 

happens once a year in the Gay-
lord National Resort and Conven-
tion Center in National Harbor, 
Maryland, — a kitschy, ritzy town 
of restaurants, bars and oversize 
convenience 
stores 
seemingly 

constructed entirely around the 
hotel’s economy. It’s a 30-minute 
drive from Washington D.C., and 
it likely wouldn’t exist if not for 
the hundreds of office retreats and 
trade shows that happen in the 
Gaylord Hotel yearly.

Marinelli 
summarized 
the 

event quite well: “It’s a four-day 
long party dedicated to video game 
music and gaming of all types.”

MAGFest 2015 was the 13th 

event of its name. Well, of its acro-
nym. Originally called the Mid-
Atlantic Gaming Festival, it was 
“back-ronymed” to Music and 
Games Festival a few years into its 
life.

For one weekend a year, Nation-

al Harbor is a different planet. It’s 
a 96-hour party that never sleeps. 
It’s a festival. It’s a convention. It’s 
absolutely insane.

But you might not want to call 

it a convention. On MAGFest’s 
website, it explicitly states that 
MAGFest is not a convention, it’s a 
festival.

“That’s me. Everyone always 

busts my ass for it, every time 
they say convention I say festival!” 
Marinelli said. “I’ve been going 
to anime conventions since high 
school, and then after you’ve been 
going to these things for however 
long, you start to ... it’s a different 
crowd at MAGfest. Anime conven-
tions are fun especially if you’re 
into that, but MAGfest is a bit of 
an older crowd, it’s a more relaxed, 
less manic crowd. I mean, the fes-

tival thing is really just a tagline, 
and if the IRS asks, we’re a con-
vention. It’s basically just meant 
to denote that it’s not your typical 
anime convention.”

Later in the interview, I mistak-

enly said “convention” again, and 
Marinelli promptly corrected me. 
Despite the reluctance to call it a 
convention, there’s actually quite 
a lot about MAGFest that’s consis-
tent with convention culture.

The music festival and gaming 

con aspects of MAGFest coexist 
fairly well. The hotel certainly has 
its standard gaming con accom-
modations: gigantic show floors 
lined with expensive arcade cabi-
net collections; panels featuring 
YouTube gaming celebrities like 
JonTron, The Angry Video Game 
Nerd and Game Grumps; areas 
for tabletop games; and of course, 
huge tournaments.

Simultaneously, a big part of 

the hotel is a dedicated music 
exhibition. There’s a jam space for 
impromptu band formation for 
congoers (read that as con-goers 
or congo-ers, either works) and 
a giant concert hall where virtu-
ally every major videogame cover 
band (as well as many hopeful DJs) 
comes to put on what has to be 
their favorite show of the year — I 
can’t see how playing for the exact 
niche audience your music was 
made for wouldn’t be.

As a frequent listener of video 

game music, it was pretty damn 
incredible to attend an event dedi-
cated to its exhibition. The suc-
cess of MAGFest is a testament 
to the genre’s diversity and lon-
gevity. Even so, it can be difficult 
to explain what makes the genre 
great — or even listenable — to 
people not in the know. Marinelli 

MAGFEST
From Page 1B

credits the appeal of the genre to 
the frequently limited tools game 
composers work with to improve 
their craft.

“It had very complex, inter-

weaving melodies and harmonies. 
When a composer is forced to cre-
ate music under those strict limita-
tions, he or she has to make damn 
sure it sounds good, otherwise 
you’re just gonna want to mute it, 
and that’s something that always 
appealed to me about it,” Marinelli 
said. “It’s cool that the constraints 
made it so that the composer had 
to exercise their creativity as much 
as they could, yet at the same time, 
the simplicity of the sound palette 
made it so that today you could 
have so many different interpre-
tations of the same song, and they 
could all be so radically different 
that you could listen to the same 
song 10 times in a row and not get 
tired of it.”

There’s 
not 
much 
synergy 

between the “music festival” and 
“gaming con” sides of MAGFest, 
other than the ability to stroll 
between the two sides of the event 
at will. But perhaps it’s the overall 
culture of MAGFest that’s syner-
gistic.

So, apparently conventions have 

their own culture? They do, and it’s 
fascinating to witness, especially 
within the walls of an ornate hotel.

What people don’t fully under-

stand about geek conventions 
and festivals like MAGFest is that 
normal societal and social rules 
simply don’t apply to them. Obvi-
ously, courtesy and civility are 
still norms, but the ground rules of 
human interaction are inherently 
different.

For one thing, people will dance 

anywhere. Amateur DJs seemed to 
have speaker setups blasting elec-
tronic music (often video-game-
themed) from every hallway in the 
Gaylord National Resort. Around 
them, small groups of sweaty guys 
and girls could be seen rollicking 
back and forth around their seg-
ment of carpeted hotel floor. I’ve 
never seen people dance like they 
do at conventions. None of them 
ever look like they actually know 
how to dance, but they move and 
jump and sing with the confidence 
of professionals.

Another oddity is the domi-

nance of cosplay. Like many con-
vention settings, around a third of 
the MAGFest attendees engaged in 
some form of cosplay — dressing 
in elaborate costumes emulating 
video game, comic book and anime 
characters. There’s no doubt that 
conventions are absolutely the 
greatest people-watching events 
in the world. Sitting or standing 

virtually anywhere in the event is 
like watching a costume parade, a 
rainbow of pop culture idolization, 
fur suits and out-there fashion.

I have to imagine that MAGFest 

is either a nice break or a royal pain 
in the ass for the hotel staff. For 
one weekend of the year, instead 
of having to deal with stuffy white 
people in suits, they instead cater 
to Hatsune Miku, the Raccoon City 
Police Department, Rei Ayanami, 
Belly Dancing Toads and the entire 
roster of Super Smash Bros.

This probably sounds like it 

would be pretty overwhelming 
to those not familiar with the con 
scene. You don’t have to be familiar 
with convention culture to appre-
ciate the event, though. Marinelli 
noted that there are so many niche 
interests represented at MAGFest 
that it would be difficult not to 
enjoy any of them.

“Video gamers enjoy MAG-

Fest, tabletop gamers, LARPers, 
cosplayers, musicians, people who 
like watching YouTube, academ-
ics, game designers, game com-
posers, artists, crafters. There’s all 
these areas at MAGFest that you 
don’t necessarily see anywhere 
else,” Marinelli said.

Perhaps the most refreshing 

aspect of MAGFest — and the 
aspect most noticeable while sim-
ply walking around the event — is 
its absolute dedication to promot-
ing 
inclusivity. 
MAGFest 
has 

absolutely the most diverse array 
of identities I’ve seen at a conven-
tion. While cons are normally 
portrayed in media as thoroughly 
white and male (for example, the 
Star Wars convention in Kevin 
Smith’s “Chasing Amy”), MAGFest 
entirely transcends that stereo-
type. MAGFest is a convention of 
geeks, to be sure, but its geeks are 
a rainbow of colors and sexualities, 
with an almost-equal gender ratio.

“We had a lot of different kinds 

of people coming into MAGFest 
(the last few years), it’s quite differ-
ent from what it used to be when 
it was a bunch of smelly dudes,” 
Marinelli said. “I’m not exactly 
sure how that happened, but I’m 
very glad it did because we’ve 
evolved into this very diverse, 
safe space where people of any 
size, shape, gender, color, religion 
and whatever can come and feel 
welcome. It’s part of our code of 
conduct, our harassment policy, 
that we don’t take any shit when it 
comes to ragging on people for any 
reason.”

To me, MAGFest even tran-

scends “college pamphlet” diver-
sity. It’s not just people of different 
races and genders. MAGFest is the 
most inclusive event I’ve maybe 

ever attended because it’s tolerant 
of different lifestyles, ideals, man-
ners of speech and more. It’s no 
wonder those dancers looked so 
confident — they felt safe and free.

“We have people in fur suits 

walking around our event. What-
ever!” Marinelli said. That’s their 
bag, that’s what they do. I’m not 
gonna … I’ve actually learned a 
lot about that, because you know, 
most people’s exposure to fur suits 
is CSI, when they had the furry 
orgy (episode) or whatever. And 
it turns out, people who wear fur 
suits just really like Ninja Turtles 
and Star Fox. Like, all right, that’s 
cool, I can get behind that. I’m glad 
that so many people are welcome 
at the event, because in the current 
age of the Internet we live in, it is 
sometimes said that we shouldn’t 
need diverse representation of 
people in gaming, and I think 
that’s 100 percent false.”

Marinelli explained to me that 

the convention has difficulty cap-
turing and selling people on the 
sprawling range of niche interests 
that MAGFest caters to.

“When I first took on the role of 

a main promo guy, I was really bad 
at it. Not that I’m not still bad at it, 
because I kept playing up the video 
game music angle. That’s what it 
was to me. I didn’t quite realize at 
the time how many different fac-
ets there are to MAGFest and how 
many different ways there are to 
enjoy it,” Marinelli said.

“When I finally twisted one 

friend’s arm into final coming, he 
thought it was the greatest thing 
ever. He said, ‘Why didn’t you tell 
me all these arcade machines were 
here? This is so cool!’ And now 
he’s the head of our merchandise 
department. It just goes to show 
that no matter what your niche is, 
you’re probably going to find it at 
MAGFest. Unless it’s 19th century 
French literature. I don’t know 
what to tell you there.”

There was no lack of conversa-

tion in my car during the eight-
hour car trip back to Ann Arbor. In 
fact, I’m pretty sure we could have 
gone for far longer reminiscing 
about what we just experienced.

If not for the wonderful culture 

of fun and inclusivity or the panels 
of famous YouTube stars, MAG-
Fest is absolutely worth attending 
just to see. The endless parade of 
congoers in immaculate home-
made costumes, the seemingly 
endless line of old-school arcade 
machines, the many after-par-
ties in Gaylord hotel rooms with 
enthusiastic and excited people 
that are colorful in every sense of 
the word — MAGFest has to be 
seen to be believed.

COURTESY OF JACOB RICH

Daily Film Editor Jacob Rich poses with two cosplayers at MAGFest.

