Screen Picks

Waging a Living (Thu., Aug. 31, 10:30 p.m., WHYY-TV) The math is simple: $5.15 x 40 x 52 = $10,712. That's what a year on the federal minimum wage will net you. The workers in Roger Weisberg's Waging a Living earn twice that, and it's still not enough. Jean Reynolds, a nursing assistant in Keansburg, N.J., makes $11 an hour, on which she must support herself, two grandchildren and her 30-year-old daughter, who has thyroid cancer. The $1,200 a month she brings home matches her rent exactly, meaning she has to work overtime just to put food on the table. No one in her family has health insurance. Jerry Longoria is a recovering drug and alcohol addict, four years sober, who works as a security guard in San Francisco for $12 an hour — barely enough to meet the city's astronomical cost of living. Mary Venittelli, a waitress in South Jersey, brings home $2.13 an hour plus tips, which some nights barely covers the cost of a babysitter for her shift. Barbara Brooks, a counselor at a juvenile detention facility in Freeport, N.Y., makes $8.25 an hour, relying on public assistance to support her and her four children. After working for years at the same pay rate, she finally gets a raise to $11 an hour — a $450 increase in her monthly salary that ends up costing her an estimated $600 in government benefits. She calls it "hustling backwards."

Of course, no one really believes that you can live on the minimum wage, and everyone knows that many Americans live in poverty; according to Waging a Living, fully a quarter of American workers earn less than the federal poverty level for a family of four. But Waging a Living shows what the struggle to get ahead actually looks like, expanding its personal narratives with well-chosen statistics that make it clear this is much more than the story of four unlucky individuals. It's not a revelation, and the film's bottom-up perspective prevents a clear look at the systemic obstacles to wage reform. (The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 1996; House Republicans recently proposed linking an increase to a cut in the estate tax, a move the New York Times rightly called "obscene.") But, like The War Tapes, it's an essential document of the price of business as usual.

Kill Your Idols (Fri., Aug. 25, mid., free, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St.) Perspective is a harsh mistress. S.A. Crary's perfunctory rock doc seems intended to pay tribute to the skronk and strangle of the New York No Wave scene by demonstrating its influence on the current generation of Brooklyn buzz bands: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, The Liars, et al. But Crary, who can't resist a cheap joke or a posturing overstatement, too often ends up making his young subjects look foolish, which in turn undercuts the movie's raison d'etre. If all Sonic Youth, Suicide, Glenn Branca and DNA did was inspire this bunch of also-ran poseurs, who gives a toss?

Studded with performance excerpts but no complete songs, Kill Your Idols asserts the forbears' influence more than demonstrating it. Apart from the youngsters' reflexive genuflection before the altar of Sonic Youth (a reverence the movie, whose title is a cleaned-up version of one of their songs, evidently shares), there's not much proof of direct or conscious influence. The new bands, naturally, deny having heard the bands they so studiously resemble (who, incidentally, are as often from the U.K. as the Lower East Side); the oldsters predictably deride the new generation's self-consciousness and careerism. (Crary here unleashes one of the movie's periodic cheap-shot montages, cutting together a bunch of young musicians all saying the word "career," as if just mouthing those syllables were an affront to art.) Lydia Lunch, once of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, proves the movie's most animated and outraged critic, slamming the new generation as a bunch of "post-punk pop mama's boys," spitting out the word "pop" as if she had a rat in her mouth.

Lunch says that, as a young musician deciding what kind of music to make, she felt the best way to pay tribute to the bands who made her want to create was to sound nothing like them, a fair description, then as now, of Teenage Jesus' unholy racket. Though Idols is rockist to the core, Lunch strikes a note of sanity when she advises newcomers, "Pick up a tuba — anything but bass, drums and guitar." Cue Gogol Bordello, even if their lead singer has committed the mortal sin of starring in a movie.

Lamely structured in thematic clumps, Idols is at once draggy and truncated, barely scratching the surface in 70 minutes, yet leaving doubts that there's a surface to scratch. Crary gets plenty of colorful quotes (not hard to do when you take a 25-year-old who thinks he's on top of the world and stick a camera in his face), but never builds them into anything worth paying attention to.