OK, maybe I'm waaaaaay too many days too late into this thread, but I just say the movie yesterday. I haven't read the books, I just recently saw thr first movie for the first time, and I haven't ever seen Battle Royale, which apparently is some thing people over here are such fans of that every other piece of fiction about death matches should emulate, regardless of the intention, audience, or themes involved. It's my experience that echo-chamber effect among anime fans tends to warp the apparent value of those works in comparison to my personal sensibilities.
But anyway.
I have no idea where Bob is coming from. Actually, as of late I just can't follow Bob's movie reviews anymore. I'd defaulted to mentally not agreeing, and then seeing if I was right after I see the movie. As a reviewer, Bob has drifted away from usefulness for me. In retrospect, the whole "Big Picture" episode about critique starts to seem more like a setup to justify posing more taste about movies as actual critique about movies.
For example, I see a lot of "it needed more action" coming from Bob, and other posters. Why? The whole point was that none of what goes on in the games is pleasant for anyone, just that some who can manage the ordeal better have higher odds of surviving. Even if you make it out alive, they still manage to rid you of your former self. It's quite true "there are no winners, only survivors". Making cool or over the top action scenes just ungrounds that whole part of the story. If a lot of that happens offscreen it's because we're following one person's journey, not the omniscient entity that sees all, though we do get some cutaways to that to carry the plot forward. Again, I don't see why this is inherintly bad or uncool or anything. It just is that way because the source material is that way. Bob is always going on about faithful adaptiations and whatnot. I can tell this is pretty faithful adaption. But since the source material is not to Bob's liking, being faithful here is a no-no.
Also, the whole anti-gay is stupid, even is sarcastically implied. I'm gay. I don't read that at all. It's about stupid and pointless decadence. The visual style, while slightly modernized for viewing audiences, repeats the motifs we've seen all through history: Egyptian pharoahs, Chinese emperors vs peasants, Frech monarchy (or well....all of European monarchies) vs their subjects, etc, etc, all the way to gaudy TV and Hollywood celebrities (like Lady Gaga) to the working class. It's always been there. There isn't any gay in there. All critics, including Bob, that try to turn into that are in desperate need of history brush-ups because their current day myopia is showing.
Finally, while I find the whole setup of the Hunger Games society a little hard to believe, I can sort of see how people would allow themselves to be oppressed for so long, since it has happened in real life too. I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of the ride, like I do for other works of fiction. So far I haven't seen some fatal self-incoherecies. Yet in Bob's view (and many others) here it's so much harder to do than for far more ludicrous works.
I could go on and on, but this is just one more sign of decreasing quality of this show. There used to be more film-making insights or meanderings in Escape to the Movie, but this show has turned into more Big Picture than critique.