Running Scared. Just not finding a movie I like..

*spoiler*

A good friend of mine is in film school, studying not so much how to make films, but more about film theory, history, and such. To me, he's doing for movies what an English Lit major does for Romantic poetry. Anyway, he seemes to think that all movies (even ones which appear to be promoting some agenda, even a religious one) are made with the primary purpose of making money. According to him, movie making is just too expensive. No one puts that much money into making movies for the sake of the movie alone, no matter what intrinsic artistic value the movie might boast. The extreme version of movies made to cash in on a particular niche of the market are called "exploitation films." From what I understand, they "exploit" certain natural human desires that various people have for a certain element in a movie. In other words, if you like movies that make your skin crawl, an exploitation film would attempt to make your skin crawl, and that might be all it did.

Anyway, my fear is that, in order to make money, movies are becoming increasingly "exploitative" in that they cater more and more to some of the these base instinctual desires that viewers have to want to see, for example, violence, nudity, suspense, thrill, grimy lovable bad guys, and the like. The result to me seems to be that most mass advertized blockbusters are becoming less and less interesting because they are all trying to accomplish the same thing. My problem is that I no longer know how to find movies that I will like. I rarely see a New Release film that doesn't cause me to look at the clock at about 50 minutes in and wonder how much longer this is going to go on. I'm bored. I feel like movies are getting worse and worse, and less and less interesting. Does anybody have this same feeling? Any suggestions?

Running Scared is just another example of what I'm talking about. It's got the perfect blend of my need to see violence that makes me recoil, suspense that makes me sit at the edge of my seet, a hot wife with a thong, an admirable bad guy, a brief meeting in a strip club, and as if they might lose dollars if the hero gets it in the end (because happy endings lose money), the bad protagonist lying but likable father reappears at the final shot with no exlanation as to how he was revived after his wife saw him die in her lap. It was this disappointing resurrection which made me realize that producers and movie directors have, I don't know, resorted to the worst kind of manipulation, the kind that leaves you completely satisfied, disgusted AND not interested in more.