Create a 'universal' reusable View?
What you may be looking for is "Contextual Filters"

Here's a good tutorial I have that explains how to implement them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFMTDuaxy8

There's also a way to call a View directly from a template, which can be pretty useful in some cases:

views_embed_view("slideshow_gallery", "page", array() );