CLEVELAND, OH – I half-watched the “River Runs Red” film on Tubi recently. From my perspective lead character Taye Diggs couldn’t wait to die. The film was so bad and full of anti-American Communist Chinese propaganda I thought he and the other leading actors in it should have registered as foreign agents.
River Runs Red was released by the Almost Never Films, Inc. in 2017 and features Diggs playing an American Negro judge whose son is shot to death by police who try to cover up the killing of the profiled and unarmed 18-year-old. The mayor is an American Negro, Frank Jackson-style, who tells his friend the judge to accept a small settlement for the justifiable shooting.
None of it sits well with the woman playing the mother of the judge’s son. She’s a Chinese actress named Jennifer Tao who speaks no English. Zilch. One look at the actor playing her son and its obvious she couldn’t have given birth to him. Diggs is a “Chocolate Brother.” The actor playing his Afro’d son is about 3/4’s his complexion and around 18. The casting was just plain stupid.
Tao’s inability to speak English made the entire film seem crazy. Imagine her screaming at Diggs in Chinese that he’s not a man if he doesn’t get revenge all in English subtitles. The scene seemed like it was taken straight out of one of the Chop-socky Chinese kung fu films starring Jackie Chan. She’s screaming in the bed at Diggs in Chinese with subtitles.
The only English words Tao could use were “that’s my son” and she was supposed to be an EMS worker in a Kentucky town. How the fuck did she pass a civil service test to become an EMS worker without knowing how to read and speak English?
More to the point. She would have to be the dumbest alien in America to give birth to an 18-year-old half American Negro and half Chinese child; and then raise and educate him without learning any English.
Almost Never Film Co. is a publicly-traded business entity led by Chinese alien Danny Chan from China. Chan is not a citizen of the United States of America. He’s Communist Chinese and claims to have attended the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University.
A Russian by the name of Daniel Roth is Almost Never’s chief financial officer. An Ohio University graduate. Derek Williams resigned from the job in 2017.
The film River Runs Red made $61,000 globally. $9000 in the United States of America. Ticket or hard copy sales are about right for the film’s poor quality. The only reason I watched until the end was to see how badly it would end. I could hear Diggs screaming, “Hurry up and let’s get this shit over” on the set right before he’s gunned down by cops for executing one of the cops who’d shot his son. Chan got Americans all wrong.
As a publicly-traded company Chan has two shareholders. The first two were Chan and Williams. They issued stock at one cent a share. Now it’s worth two pennies a share.
Almost Never Films, Inc. was originally SMACK Sportswear. The original company manufactured and sold performance and lifestyle-based indoor and sand volleyball apparel and accessories. The corporation’s original solder the inventory and became a “shell company” under Rule 12b-2 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Chan and Williams acquired the Smack Sportswear shell company and reorganized it as Almost Never Films, Inc. The corporation’s trading symbol was changed to HLWD.
Chan’s 2019 Series 10K identifies “foreign markets” and “investors” as “a very important portion of the financing for independent motion pictures.” The SEC 10K report affirmed that a “third party financier” owns and controls production rights to the pictures Almost Never develops.
What Chan does not do is identify the third party financier or the money they’ve been investing in his quarterly filings to the SEC. It could be his Iconic Private Equity Partners based in Hong Kong where he is the “managing director.” Patrick Soon Shiong owns the Los Angeles Times and issues news releases to announce “partnerships” between the two entities he owns. It’s like an “imaging” scam to create the illusion that their self-financed deals between themselves are supported by outside investors.
In 2017 Almost Never was capitalized at the $121,000 level; so the money to pay Diggs, Cusack, Lopez and Hemsworth their high wages came from someplace other than his stock shares unless they worked for a percentage of gross ticket sales. Taking a percentage on that garbage would have been dumb as the film was that horrible.
I once managed the Miles Drive-in Theater outside Cleveland in Warrensville Heights. My cousin managed it after me for 20 years. My Dad was the last manager. I’ve co-produced a jogging tape for Olympian Alberto Salazar. I co-produced an instructional tarot card video for my Son’s Mother. Both for Peter Pan Parade Industries. I’ll reiterate. Chan’s film was horrible and a financial bust. My two artists got more in royalties than what Chan’s film earned at the box office.
According to its 2019 Series 10K filing, Almost Never Films, Inc. seeks to produce and market movies the cost between $5 million and $50 million to create. There’s no SEC filing showing an infusion of even $5 million to produce River Runs Red.
Chan failed to file his latest 10Q report on time. He’s now in SEC administrative trouble land. Almost Never appears to be the right name for the film company Chan founded as he ain’t almost never gonna have an audience to watch the shit he’s producing. At least he’s not wasting anyone else’s money since no one but him and a partner own all their “publicly traded” shares.
If this is the business the Kelly School of Business taught Chan at Indiana University, dude would have been better off reading a copy of Napolean Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.”
Tao called her appearance in Chan’s Red River Run her big break. It might have been if Tao spoke good English like Lucy Liu; and was fine like Lucy Liu.
It was fun watching Diggs and Liu in “Set it up.”
