After a balmy 70s in NYC today, temperatures are predicted to drop to the 40s over the weekend. So Sunday evening I plan to sip hot chocolate and watch Noah Wyle star as our favorite librarian/action hero in The LIbrarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines, the sequel to TNT’s “inexplicably successful” 2004 TNT movie: The Librarian:  Quest for the Spear. Yes, the first movie was cheesy and silly, and the New York Times critic didn’t like the new one either. Still how often do you get to watch a librarian as a sexy hero, rather than as a repressed, bun-wearing shushing harridan?. (By the way, Wyle in an interview  noted he got gratifying mail from librarians who were pleased “that we’re trying to rewrite the paradigm of what an action hero is supposed to be — that it’s not just might that makes right, that sometimes the biggest brain can win you out in the end.” And to see Bob Newhart, playing the library curator, chastise Wyle for wiping his sweaty face on the Shroud of Turin is worth the two hours of wasted TV watching. 

My old friend Judy Quinn and I have a phrase that we say  whenever we see libraries and librarians portrayed in movies or on television. We call them “Library Journal moments”. The two TNT Librarian movies are ultimate LIbrary Journal moments but some other favorites include David O. Russell’s Spanking the Monkey in which the incestuous mother, who is a librarian, is lying in bed with a broken leg reading LIbrary Journal, and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan in which one of the WASPY Park Avenue characters quotes a line from a LJ book review. What’s your favorite Library Journal moment?