Film Magazines: Losing Their Punch

Film Magazines: Losing Their Punch


By Manjula Lal

Some years ago, Cine Blitz had come out with a special April Fool¿s issue which said on the cover that ¿one of the stories in this issue is a hoax¿ - there were prizes for those who guessed it right. That was the last time I read a film magazine cover to cover - and enjoyed the experience, especially as it did exercise one¿s grey cells a teeny weeny bit, which is supposed to be why you read anything at all. (I thought the hoax article was the one in which Aamir Khan confessed to having fallen for Juhi Chawla, but it turned out to be something else.)

This month, half hoping for some such fun experience, and provoked by Raveena Tandon¿s remark on a TV programme that "film magazines are all trash", I went out and bought issues of all three English film magazines: Filmfare (Bennet Coleman & Co), Stardust (Magna), and Cine Blitz (from RIFA Publications). Screen has been excluded as it is a trade magazine, a different genre. There was no April Fool¿s, unless it was Stardust¿s cover story on the affair between Kareena Kapoor and Hrithik Roshan. That was one major disappointment.

The second one was that there was not one bit of interesting gossip in those pages which I didn¿t know already from reading mainstream papers. It makes one question why The Times of India is killing its own film magazine by making it redundant. Or is that a gameplan? You never know, maybe the Filmfare Awards function and the Delhi/Bombay Times generate more revenue than the multi-edition daily. On the whole, there is little evidence that those who buy these magazines just for the reading material gain much. What used to be their other USP -- glossy pictures and posters - seems to have lost its shine.

Stardust even has a feature on Celine Jaitley, the girl who made it to fourth place in Miss Universe, looking positively ordinary. Perhaps film magazines as a whole have lost out to television, and to filmi websites, from where you can download the latest screensavers without spending a penny or defacing the walls of your room. The gossip is there even on MSN¿s home page, which is where I first read that Raveena Tandon (that girl again) is being linked with Rahul Dravid. Still, not many of us are so pretentious that we wouldn¿t flick through a film magazine at a doctor¿s room or on a train journey, not least because it would enable you to escape from the trials and travails of your present situation. So just dismissing them as trash won¿t do. Moreover, what was Raveena Tandon doing anyway giving a long interview to Stardust for its latest issue? (To the inevitable question about Dravid, she replied frostily, "Next question.")

My verdict: the best part of these magazines is undoubtedly the gossipy stuff. It¿s like the compulsive reading of horoscopes: you don¿t believe a word of it, but you read it anyway. Most people also enjoy dissecting the hype to find out what the incident was that led to the fabricated affair -- and very often stories that were vehemently denied at first did turn out to be true after all (think Dilip¿s Asma, Juhi Chawla¿s secret marriage, or the Azharuddin-Sangeeta link-up). So we would tell filmi scribes: keep digging. It would be unfair to do otherwise when crime reporting in the Capital is as salacious, as presumptuous, as sensation-seeking and much more hurtful to its victims

Now to the nitty-gritty, such as it is. Stardust, whose catty snippets ¿Neeta¿s Natter¿ were Shobha De¿s most worthy contribution to the world of publishing, is now poorly executed, suffering from sloppy language and imagination. Cline Blitz¿s snippet corner, the imitation which is better than the original, is called Madame M¿s Champagne Cyanide, and is the clear winner: snazzy, zany and thoroughly enjoyable but again, very little that¿s new, thanks to the monthly periodicity. Filmfare¿s equivalent "I Spy¿ is a trifle dull, as the group seems to have taken a decision to give news about the trade, who¿s in which film etc, rather than get bitchy about personal lives.