As always, a very sincere thank you to everyone who regularly reads this blog and who sends titles to add to this site. As I mentioned last month, you’ve made it possible to upgrade these monthly “bonus” posts into a regular feature! Please keep sharing!
Thank you to everyone who reads this Reel Librarians blog! We have a special community here, and this shows up especially in the monthly “recent additions” post as y’all continue to share additional titles to add to this site. This increases awareness of library scenes and reel librarians in movies and TV shows and helps demonstrate the breadth and depth of our profession onscreen. ❤
Therefore, I have decided to move the monthly “bonus” recent additions posts into regularly scheduled posts. You will still be getting 2 posts a month, published on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month; one of those posts will now be a recent additions update post, and the other post will continue to be an original analysis post.
Hey Arnold gif via Giphy.com, shared under “fair use” guidelines
Thank you for your patience for this special report and brief interruption in our regular programming! See y’all again next month! 🙂
Why not revisit another memorable library fight scene?!
Last month, we revisited the library (adjacent) fight scene in Thor: The Dark World (2011), which was set in and around the Old Royal Naval College Library in London. So why not revisit another memorable library fight scene, this time in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019), set in the iconic New York Public Library.
I was inspired by an article in The Ringer, an exhaustive look at “Every John Wick Kill, Ranked.” And this article really does what it says: it ranks every single killing across the first four John Wick films (a fifth movie is rumored but has no release date yet), totaling 415 notches on John Wick’s belt. Exhausting indeed. This is why the internet exists, y’all, so we can enjoy these deep-dives into pop culture! OF COURSE, for me, the most memorable kill in the entire John Wick series thus far is the library fight scene in the third film (uh, spoiler?), but of course, I am biased! I was intrigued to see how highly this fight scene ranked for a non-librarian.
And out of 415 total kills in 4 movies (thus far)… the library fight scene ranked at an impressive #12! I was secretly hoping for a top 10 finish, but it’s not far off!
I did laugh at the brief write-up for this scene, and the observation that it was befitting to have a library-centric scene in a film with the word “Chapter” in its title, LOL! 😀
“After absorbing one of the world’s longest front kicks ever, Wick gets a read on the situation and kills overeager henchman Ernest (Boban Marjanovic!) by snapping his neck over a book. It’s amazing, and almost necessary because the word “Chapter” is in the film’s title.”
A student in the library shushes Jane and her squeaky shoes!
The stand-alone Thor movies thus far have been pretty consistent with showcasing library, book, and/or research scenes! In this movie, Thor: The Dark World (2013), Thor reunites with Jane Foster and battles Malekith and the army of Dark Elves. Thor: The Dark World is part of MCU’s Phase Two. Upon rewatching, this sequel to Thor — directed this go-round by Alan Taylor and often cited as among the worst MCU movies — was actually better than I remembered it being. It has two main things going for it:
Chris Hemsworth’s eyebrows are not bleached blonde like they were in the first Thor movie, and
At 1 hour and 26 minutes into the movie, Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) arrive at the Greenwich site of convergence for plot reasons. They walk hurriedly through an academic library in London, and you can see a wooden, rolling book cart in the foreground.
Inside the Royal Naval College Library
The captions reveal that Jane’s shoes squeak… which is why they get shushed by a student in the library!
A student shushes Jane and her squeaky shoes!
Meanwhile, Thor and the main baddie Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) are fighting it out in the college courtyard, and at 1 hour and 30 minutes, the perspective switches back to students in the library checking out the fight from the library’s windows.
Click on any image in the gallery below to view in a larger window.
Jane warns the students in the libraryStudents have a front-row view of Thor’s fight from the library’s windowsStudent captures Thor’s fight on his cell phoneStudents watch Thor’s fight from inside the library
Jane: What are you all doing? You need to get out of here, now!
Student [holding a phone in his hand]: You’re joking, right? That’s Thor out there! He’s waving his hammer around and everything!
Fun fact: The actor who has this bit line is Royce Pierreson, who plays Istredd in Netflix’s The Witcher TV series!
The next thing we see, Thor’s hammer sends shock waves that blow out the windows in the library. Jane warned y’all.
Click on any image in the gallery below to view in a larger window.
A wide shot of the windows breaking in the libraryA closeup of the windows breaking in the libraryWindow wreckage in the library
The library scene lasts less than a minute total, but it is a very cinematically striking scene that helps demonstrate the real-world effects and damage due to Thor’s fighting.
The location of the beautiful library is the Old Royal Naval College Library in London. Here are a couple of different views of the library’s exterior and courtyard during this fight scene.
Use the slider below to view and compare both screenshots.
Old Royal Naval College setting
No librarians were easily discernible in this scene — again, it looked like a student shushed Jane and Erik earlier in the scene, not a librarian — so Thor: The Dark World falls into the Class V category.
Thor: The Dark World. Dir. Alan Taylor. Perf. Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Christopher Eccleston. Marvel Studios / Disney, 2013.
REEL LIBRARIANS 