"the female wants the story and character development while the male won't hold still for too much of that"

Hey, c'mon! I want the story and the character development. Without 'em, you ain't got much there worth watching. And I'm a male. I also enjoy a certain amount of suspense and drama in a story, and that would be where some violence can come in, but how much violence is the question? It gets way overdone in most modern films.

Think back to a great Humphrey Bogart film like "Key Largo". Gangsters...the constant possibility of violence...that's suspenseful. But how much actual violence was in that movie? A very minimul amount by today's standards, and it was all that was needed to make the story work. That's good movie-making. We live in a pretty decadent society now, and the movie-makers keep trying to shock an increasingly jaded audience by filling a film with exaggerated action scenes showing unreal episodes of bloody violence. I don't call that good movie-making, but the younger (male) audience now has been conditioned to expect it. Subtlety and suspense are becoming a lost art, it's all spectacle and shock thrill now. I call that decadence. Matter of fact, that is what has happened in mainstream pop music as well...