are old jokes best?

I've been reading reviews of the new Star Trek for a couple of weeks. I thought Lance Mannion's "Not my review . . . " was the best of the lot. Informative, critical, supportive of some of the basic concepts of the original; it was 'top of the heap" - and it may be yet . . . but (there it is, the big BUT), I must confess to being completely bowled over by (Anthony Lane's) the Highly Illogical review in The New Yorker's current edition (turns out, it is also online). Read them both - compare them - these are two reviewers with (axes to grind, perhaps) no guile, allowing that some of us have finite resources (and choices to be made) in our approach to possibilities of infinity.

I wish I could sit down, sharing a pitcher of St. Arnold's wheat ale, and discuss Mr. Lane's take on the exhaustion "for comic value" of Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers" with Mr. Mannion.