Question regarding indirect function calls

[Maxwell Hammer]

I am just starting to learn python but I love it already..
Ok the question..
In the program I'm trying to write I have a module called "plugins"
containing a number of functions. I only know at runtime the name of a
function to call from "plugins", i.e. need to call a function indirectly.
The problem is that assigning the name of one of plugin's functions to a
variable, I cannot then call the function. IOW:
 func=function1
 plugins.func() ..........will fail
 plugins.function1() .......will pass

Perhaps the following code snippet explains it better...

 <example>
 import plugins # <--------module containing functions I want to call
                # indirectly, say function "function1"

 def test(job)
 # determine whether the job binary is either an internal plugin
 # or an exernal executable
 job_bin = string.strip(job[2])  <---the name of the actual job is here
 
 if os.access(job_bin, os.X_OK):
   print "external job found"  # job binary is an external program
 else:
   # find out which names our "plugin" module defines
   # and try to find our job in that list of names
   for element in dir(plugins):
    if job_bin == element:
      print "found match for job_bin: ",element
      if callable(plugins.function1):
        print "explicit call: job is callable" <-----------explicit call works
	try:
          plugins.job_bin <---------------------implicit call fails
          print "implicit call: job is callable"
        except:
          print "implicit call: job is not callable"
      else:
        print "explicit call: job is NOT callable"

To show what works and doesn't here's the sample output:
>> 
  found match for function1
  explicit call: job is callable
  implicit call: job is not callable
>>

The above is for illustration only to show that I can only call 
plugins.function1 directly. I have read python.org docs and am also using
book "The Complete Python Reference", but no where can I find the reason
why my code fails.

Thanks in advance for your help