Mentoring and “Inspirational Teacher” Movies

As I near the end of my fall semester university mentoring fellowship, I had an interesting conversation with one of the course leaders earlier this week.  I was toying with the idea of basing some future mentoring training on discussions of vignettes from popular movies that include examples of good and bad mentoring relationships.  I have been compiling a list in the back of my mind over the semester that included the more traditional "inspirational teacher" movies (eg Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, The Great Debaters etc – you know the ones) and movies with mentoring relationships that are more out in left field eg William Hurt's character giving Albert Brooks' character news anchorman mentoring tips in "Broadcast News" and Sigourney Weaver being a treachorous mentor in "Working Girl" – not to mention the scene in "Postcards from the Edge" where Shirley MacLaine's overbearing stage-mother character is competing with her daughter's (Meryl Streep's) agent in giving career advice to her daughter in "Postcards from the Edge".

When I discussed the list with my colleague who leads the mentoring fellowship, he said that he liked the idea, but would cut all the "inspirational teacher" movies because they give the misleading impression that mentoring is a skill we are born with that cannot be learned – so that using the movies in the context of mentoring training would just be demoralizing particularly to those who are not "natural" mentors.  I had never thought of it in these terms but I thought it was a very good point.  Any ideas on whether "inspirational teacher" movies should ever themselves be teacher training tools?  And any other thoughts on good mentoring moments in movies?  (Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street" perhaps?)