The Shipping News is a good example of a film that has been badly adapted, or perhaps should never have been adapted, from a novel. At every moment of the plot you can feel there is more going on than is ever revealed. You can feel the lack of subtlety that a novel would have given to some moments - for instance the flashbacks. Everything is packed in to too short a time, not given the space to breathe and develop as it should. Big name actors are used when it should have been unknowns. The theme of the shipping news is lost, and never really expanded upon in the way it must be in the book. Overall, any tension or excitement that was in the book is lost. The audience is left unfulfilled, feeling that there is so much more to say, or so much more has been said, about what is going on. I think if you want to adapt a book you have to be very brave and cut large sections of, and whole themes. I'm not saying a film is less complex. A film's complexity works in entirely different ways. You cannot equate one with the other, but have to translate a book to film. Only very rarely has this been done successfully, and then it depends on whether you read the book or saw the movie first...
I forgot to mention that the music in Night at the Museum was actually very good. It was real, at least, not synthetic, and powerful. A proper family film musical score, like they used to make them.
