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Tristan & Isolde (2006)

In the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde, young lovers become doomed against the forces of royal politics. English knight Tristan wins the hand of the daughter of the Irish King, but the love threatens the truce between their two countries. ...(source: yahoo.com)

Movie Review: Tristan & Isolde (2006) - Opening Nationwide 1/13/06 -- Harvey Karten says: It's hard enough to sit through five hours of Wagnerian music drama, but believe-it-or-not, the reimaginging of the movie version, while eliminating 80% of the opera, is even worse. w/Rufus Sewell, David O'Hara, Jamie King. PG-13 for intense battle sequences and some sexuality. Medieval legend, Drama and Romance.
Dante ("Inferno") Alighiere was born too soon. If his parents waited for a few centuries to pass, Dante would have described a new vision of Hell. The damned would spend eternity listening to Richard Wagner's operas, just as Malcolm McDowell's character Alex de Large was subjected to some booming Beethoven in "Clockwork Orange" 34 years ago. If you want an evening in the near future to last for a long time, go to one of the German composer's music-dramas. While a "mere" six hours would pass, you'll think it's eighteen. Happily, when Kevin Reynolds, director, and Dean Georgaris, scripter, get together to re-imagine the Celtic legend from the Dark Ages, "Tristan und Isolde," they cut the time drastically, eliminat the fat lady, and stress physical action that the legitimate stage could not encompass...more details...

Recording of January 2006: Wagner: Tristan und Isolde - Richard Wagner long planned but never composed Die Sieger (The Victors), an opera based on the life of Buddha and informed by the writings of Schopenhauer, the closest European thought has ever come to Buddhism. Instead he wrote Tristan und Isolde, perhaps the most persuasive aesthetic evidence we have of the Buddhist principles that human existence is mainly suffering, and that the primary human task is the detachment from the desires that cause such pain. This is not, apparently, what Wagner thought he was doing. As he wrote to Franz Liszt in December 1854, not long before beginning to compose Tristan, "As I have never in my life tasted the true joy of love, I will raise a monument to this loveliest of all dreams, in which from first to last this love shall for once be satisfied utterly." This from the epicenter of the Romantic movement, of which Wagner was zenith or nadir, depending on one's taste. From the vantage of the psychologically informed if emotionally benumbed 21st century, Wagner seems instead to have, in Tristan, raised to romantic love not so much a monument as a tombstone...more details ...