Having watched each of Woody Allen’s films at least once and many of them too many times (except for Radio Days, in Allen’s oeuvre it is the heaven amongst his many spiritual hells) Vicky Cristina Barcelona does not do much to stretch one of his most basic and redundant themes: the quest for meaning in a bourgeois American landscape of too much money and not enough authenticity.

The main characters in these particular Woody Allen films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Match Point, Deconstructing Harry, Husbands and Wives, Shadows and Fog, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, et al. – all have one basic problem: money. After you get over the bleak tidal wave of an Allen chamber drama and have time to reflect, you quickly realize that his character’s problems and existential quandaries typically boil down to the fact that they have too much time to sit around and think about shit.

Which is not to say that Allen doesn’t make superb films. He’s a modern master of a particular kind of film that is rarely attempted let alone pulled off nowadays: the drama. However, the more he runs the needle through the groove of existential quandaries as a theme the more redundant and derivative his films become. People have been behaving badly and selfishly for centuries, that’s a given, and people with money do it better than anyone.

If you read the general criticism of Woody Allen’s work these types of observations come up regularly, in fact they’re fairly pedestrian. Additionally, if you read his 1995 book of interviews Woody Allen on Woody Allen you’ll quickly realize that he doesn’t care very much. He likes making movies and makes a lot of them and can’t or won’t quit scratching that same thematic itch. Speculation in this realm is futile. Do an internet search for Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen – the man has too much baggage.

Woody Guthrie dying in a Brooklyn hospital inspired Bob Dylan to write these words about hope: “Cause you can’t find it on a dollar bill, and it ain’t on Macy’s window sill, and it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map, and it ain’t in no fat kid’s fraternity house, and it ain’t made in no Hollywood wheat germ…” So where do you find hope today? Woody Guthrie’s dead, Dylan’s about to be, the good poets are all gone (or perhaps our language is dead), post-1920 art sucks, modern philosophy is meaningless and inapplicable, fashion is eating itself, and good music is awash in depression or cynicism.

Or is it? In many of Woody Allen’s films he sets up a counterpoint to the privileged class, the working class characters romanticized because of their ignorance to the “larger” issues in life. They just want to live, dance and have a good time and don’t understand why someone would spend all their time being so miserable. Work is a necessary evil for these characters, love is a pleasure, God is a given and heaven is the inevitable result. And, there’s a lot of singing.

Buyepongo is that kind of band and in Los Angeles provides that kind of hope to small audiences in almost anonymous coffee shops at the almost anonymous hours approaching midnight. If you miss your 9pm train out of L.A.’s Union Station and have to wait until the 11:30pm train then perhaps you’ll make your way across the street, literally, to Olvera Street’s best coffee shop, Casa De Sousa. There you’ll find the sometimes six, sometimes eight, piece band playing Central American dance music – Cumbia – and getting down in a serious way.

The band consists of no one over the age of 21, some of them barely speak English, and they hail from regions in South America, Central America and Mexico – some are first generation native born, some are not. It’s a strange sight to watch, it’s like punk rock in Spanish with accordions and bongo drums, but everyone dances and yells and has something typically lacking at most music shows: fun.

Buyepongo might sit at the crest of a coming wave, of which there is no real proof, only conjecture. Whites have recently become the minority in the State of California and by 2042 will be in the United States in general. In Los Angeles that change occurred some time ago; by 2006 71 per cent of Los Angeles County’s population was considered minority (all of which opens up larger questions than this article can cover).

What we’re seeing happening in Los Angeles will soon be what’s happening in the United States: a traditionally marginalized group harnessing the DIY power of their adopted and sometimes native country’s punk and hipster heritage, combining it with the newer tools of MySpace and YouTube and coming out with a mixture fraught with energy, emotion and spirit.

Perhaps it is here that we’ll begin to find that regeneration of the U.S.’s own dying culture; a culture choked by money, a dead spiritual life and fear. Let’s just pray that as these coming generations mature they don’t settle for the given, and continually reach back into their histories for the possible. Let’s just hope it’s fun.