The robots that went up a hill and came down a mountain

There was an interesting debate on Ernest Bazanye's blog about the new Transformers film (a film with the somewhat gradiose title 'Revenge of the fallen'). Bazanye defended the film as basically eye candy- leave your brain at the door and enjoy it. The argument goes that fighting robots are so intrinsically cool that there is no point obsessing over plot or character. It's a point I've seen repeated elsewhere.
It is a fair point to a certain extent, but the question is where do you draw the line? At what point does the crass emptiness of the modern blockbuster become offensive? Simply saying a film is a 'silly blockbuster' so we should just sit back and enjoy makes sense only if it doesn't completely destroy our standards of judging a film. Should we really dispense with a coherent or interesting plot because the story is about fighting robots? I don't have a problem with all current blockbusters- I enjoyed Terminator: Salvation and Watchmen for example and I was more kindly disposed to X-Men: origins than most critics were. All those films to varying degrees had an engrossing story, fairly believable characters and were directed with a certain degree of craftsmanship. Even action sequences- which is what many pay to see- need to be directed well. McG did that fairly well in Terminator. Bay directs his action sequences as if he is having a seizure. He is in love with excess and his characters are almost always flat or shallow, as if the budget didn't extend to actually working on characters and dialogue. One critic observed that Bay's love for excess was a result of-how do I put this delicately-certain deficiencies in the nether regions. A form of overcompensation. That's a tad harsh, but I can see what he was getting at.
Another friend of mine,defending the film, said that it had Megan Fox in various states of undress so that was worth the price of admission alone. Hello- have you ever heard of the internet? What is the point of paying through the nose to stare at Megan Fox if you can trawl through hundreds of pictures of her on the internet? Fox is a good-looking woman, but you would never to convince me to part with cash just to see her in a film. (Admittedly I would abandon such lofty principles for certain actresses like Rachel Mcadams or Carla Gugino, but thats a story for another time and at least they can bloody well act)
And a bigger problem is that such films make such huge sums of money that studios become more willing to greenlight similar films in increasingly high numbers. Now I've actually liked a few of Michael Bay's films- Bad Boys was entertaining and The Rock is very good indeed. However no one does soulless 'what the hell, just blow it up and see' sort of films like Bay. He is a man who would never use dialogue or restrained action where a 10 minute sequence of explosions or a lingering shot of a woman's cleavage will do. Bad Boys 2 was a travesty and Pearl Harbour was juvenile. As Roger Ebert so wonderfully put it, the film potrayed that event as the day when 'the Japanese staged a suprise attack on an American love triangle'. The attack itself was handled well, but the rest of the film is absolutely laughable. The same goes for Armageddon which towards the end tries to launch a shock and awe attack on your tear ducts in a way so shameless that you almost admire him. The first Transformers was mildly entertaining, but it only occasionally came within spitting distance of competence. It is interesting that Bay complained to the studio that they were not marketing Revenge of the Fallen as the 'event' movie it was. Such films are barely films at all- they are a 'product' and an 'event'. Many people are convinced to go because everyone else is going. Really what was the point of the sheer, mind-numbing awfulness that was the new Fast and Furious?
I'd be lying if I said there wasn't snobbery at some level involved on my part (Although let's face it, we are all snobs in our different ways). If a friend comes out of Revenge of the fallen raving about it and calling it one of his favourite films of the year, I am likely to lose a bit of respect for them. The same goes for anyone I see reading a Dan Brown book. Is that fair? To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, fair has got nothing to do with it. Obviously such things tend to be subjective, but I'm uncomfortable with zealous celebrations of mediocrity or-in the case of Transformers- outright trash. I firmly believe the fact that Revenge of the Fallen is now one of the highest-grossing films of all time is a sad commentary on the world today.