"Islands in the Stream"

- one of my favorite movies, based on my favorite Hemingway novel, will be released tomorrow on DVD. George C. Scott does about as good a Thomas Hudson/Ernest Hemingway as you're ever likely to see.

As opposed to the pop culture perception of Hemingway as a hairy-chested slayer of animals, I've always thought of him as something of a mystic, best shown in works such as "Big Two-Hearted River" and "Islands."

I bought a VHS copy of "Islands" several years ago from half.com, after I found it was out-of-print, and had planned to transfer it over to DVD after we bought our DVR/TiVo system. For reasons known only to Paramount Home Video, this obscure movie, which did poorly in both theatres and VHS release, was copy-protected, pissing me off tremendously when I discovered that I couldn't save it to DVD. Did Paramount really think dozens of bootleggers were going to be circulating copies of "Islands"?