Don't Blame the Messenger (or in this case the director)

I just watched a trailer for "Red Riding Hood", which looks like fun.  My post, however, is on the comments about it.  More than one person said they were going to pass on the movie because it is directed by the director of "Twilight", Catherine Hardwicke.

This leads me to wonder--did these commenters actually dislike the DIRECTION of "Twilight"?  Really?  With all else that was wrong with it, they noticed bad direction?  Or maybe they haven't read the source material.  (For a good introduction to that source material, head on over to a hilarious blog titled Reasoning With Vampires.)  I only thought the movie was bad until I read the books.  Boy, was I wrong!  Now, IMHO, I think they did a FABULOUS job on the movie.  Absolutely everyone who worked on it, from the actors to the payroll clerk to, yes, the director, did a great job with the material that was given to them.

You may be wondering why I saw the movie, or read the book(s!).  DH and I love vampires, and anything to do with them.  We had initially avoided the, ahem, literature (and I use that term VERY loosely) because it was aimed at kids, but once the first movie was released, we gave in and bought them.  Sigh.  We saw the movie before we started the books.  We were disappointed in the movie, but we already owned the books so we figured we might as well read them. 

Big mistake.  Big, big, BIG mistake.  Especially since both of us have trouble putting down books once we start them.  Or, as was the case here, series of books.  I realize I'm probably going to get flamed for this (actually, for the entire post), but I have read stories by 13-year-olds that are better written.  And I won't even get into bad (awful, horrible) role models or questionable scientific reasoning.  The writing is bad enough to stand all on its own.  And no, it's not a style thing or an audience-age thing--it's simply badly written.  From grammatical errors to badly written sentences to obscure words used simply to impress to factual contradictions, it's bad.

Not that I feel strongly about it or anything.