Word: alberts
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...second acts in American lives? Ask comeback celebs such as Woody Allen, Eddie Murphy -- and now, Marv Albert. The disgraced sportscaster, just named as a new radio voice of the New York Knicks, is back. Yesss! Allen outlasted his image as a cradle-robbing lech, and Murphy lived down his alleged encounter with a transvestite prostitute. So even though it took just 10 months, Albert's return after the infamous back-biting incident is hardly the most spectacular rehabilitation in American public life...
...also not the most succesful. Murphy has had a string of well-received movies -- "Dr. Doolittle," "The Nutty Professor" -- since the transvestite scandal, and Allen has found success "Deconstructing Harry," among other things. For Albert, once the lead basketball announcer for NBC, local New York City radio must be a comedown. (He'll also be manning the sports desk for Madison Square Garden's cable network.) On the other hand, it's a big step up from oblivion. Remember Jimmy the Greek and Al Campanis, two guys who got a one-way ticket to showbiz oblivion after making impolitic remarks...
That journey often stirs painful memories. Before 1943, six decades of restrictions barred Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. The few allowed in were interrogated at length, and their detailed case files offer invaluable though sometimes heartbreaking information. Says San Francisco's Albert Cheng, who is president of the Chinese Culture Foundation: "The exclusion acts devastated our families, but they provide the only record here." Miraculously, Cheng, 49, has located five of his family's 32-volume genealogy books, the traditional records kept by village elders, and has used them to reconstruct 3,000 years of familial past...
...might hope Eddie Murphy's new comedy would have some of the coarse elan of The Nutty Professor--its parading of his gift for mimicry and disguise. But here he's a physician who not only can talk to the animals (voiced by Norm MacDonald, Albert Brooks, Chris Rock and other familiars) but also has to listen to every cocky word they say. So this very active actor must be mainly reactive. And there's not much humor in 85 minutes of Eddie going...
...cards to be dealt into surprising, plausible play. Notable jokers in this deck include Ving Rhames and Steve Zahn as Foley's accomplices--the former prone to careless confession, the latter a blitzed former hippie not sharp enough for the criminal life--and a comically menacing Don Cheadle making Albert Brooks' white-collar jailbird understandably nervous...