BLOWBACK

Stephanie Zacharek, a critic I admire, went ballistic on David Thomson's new book in the NYTimes Book Review. It struck me as unnecessarily mean-spirited:

Thomson's dismissiveness of silents makes him seem like a fogy who's trying to be jazzy -- as if he were overly concerned to reassure us he's not one of those film scholars who's hung up on the deeper meaning of Griffith's tinting techniques. But if the real test of our modernity is how we feel about the past, Thomson's view of Hollywood's earliest products -- and its earliest art -- suggests he's not as with it as he professes to be. Then again, silent film probably wouldn't be popular with a writer who likes words -- lots of them -- as much as Thomson does. To show a world of heartbreak in a single, silent frame is the kind of economy that's lost on him. Maybe that's why, when you reach the last page of ''The Whole Equation'' and close its cover, the silence seems so golden.

Here's Michiko Kakutani in those same pages: far more fair-minded, even if she uses the word "tiresome" to describe Thomson's intricate business data:

In Mr. Thomson's view, a younger generation (which has grown up with television, video games and computers) now tends to take moving imagery for granted and will never respond to movies with the same sort of seriousness and awe that his generation did. In the past two decades, he argues, ''it has been evident that the essential young audience flinches from being moved at the movies'': ''they prefer motion, spectacle, novelty and a readiness for the visible to exceed reality'' to the ''stealthy rapture'' viewers once felt at being drawn into a place that, however illusionary and heightened, was at the same time, palpable and recognizable as a real world.