Kathmandu:

One of the funniest movies of 2005 was The Matador, which has Pierce Brosnan acting out of character. Damian Fowler of the BBC reports, “The Matador is a subversive, sometimes vulgar black comedy about a washed-up hitman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It stars the man formerly known as Bond, James Bond, in a very different kind of role. Since his illustrious stint as 007 ended last year, Brosnan ditched his dapper demeanour to play the seedy character of Julian Noble”.

Said Brosnan, “It was liberating to play a character role, to play dark comedy, to play something that touches on emblems of my career.”

Julian Noble is a man at the end of his tether when he stumbles upon an earnest businessman Danny Wright, played by Greg Kinnear, in a hotel bar in Mexico City. This brush with decency seems to offer the boozy assassin some kind of salvation, even though it threatens to compromise Danny’s wholesome lifestyle. They meet again in Danny’s home where Danny’s wife and Danny watch Julian crumble and help to put him together in the most exciting way.

Director Richard Shepard muses, “I wanted to subvert Pierce’s image. Not specifically about Bond but almost all the roles he plays, like The Thomas Crown Affair, he’s always in suits, he’s always perfect looking. I said to him: I want you to play a very different sort of character.”

For Eastern audiences Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a bit wordy and the very funny jokes are Western and so a trifle obscure but it’s worth seeing if you like Hollywood, Robert Downey Junior and Val Kilmer. Critic Bret Fetzer writes, “As a screenwriter, Shane Black made millions of dollars from screenplays for the big-budget action movies Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, among others. With his directing debut Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Black mocks and undercuts every cliche he once helped to invent. While fleeing from the cops, small time hood Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr) stumbles into an acting audition and does so well he gets taken to Hollywood, where pursuing a girl he loved in high school (foxy Michelle Monaghan), he gets caught up in twisty murder mystery. His only chance of getting out alive is a private detective named Gay Perry (Val Kilmer,), who sidelights as a consultant for movies.”

If you are into planes and can figure out the insides of Jumbo Jets then you will enjoy Flightplan. I take the same stand as Jeff Shannon who writes, “Like a lot of stylishly persuasive thrillers, Flightplan is more fun to watch than it is to think about. There’s much to admire in this hermetically sealed mystery, in which a propulsion engineer and grieving widow (Jodie Foster) takes her six-year-old daughter on a transatlantic flight aboard a brand-new jumbo jet she helped design, and faces a mother’s worst nightmare when her daughter (Marlene Lawston) goes missing. But how can that be? Is she delusional? Are the flight crew, the captain (Sean Bean) and a seemingly sympathetic sky marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) playing out some kind of conspiratorial abduction? In making his first English-language feature, German director Robert Schwentke milks the mother’s dilemma for all it’s worth, and Foster’s intense yet subtly nuanced performance encompasses all the shifting emotions required to grab and hold your attention like Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Your best bet is to fasten your seatbelt and enjoy the thrills on a purely emotional level.”