Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. In this week's installment of the Screening Room, Mark looks at a pair of documentaries: "In the Shadow of the Moon" and "No End in Sight."

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON (2007)

In 1961, John F. Kennedy challenged the United States, its citizens, its scientists, and its military to be first to put a man on the moon. It was a challenge motivated by a personal vision, but also by politics and the recognition that the country was foundering for direction and pride. The Russians, who were the enemy at that time, had put a man into space. Perhaps a little like a schoolboy challenging another to a spitting contest, Kennedy threw down the gauntlet and brought the country together to meet this challenge. He didn't live to see it but by the end of the decade his vision had been fulfilled.

"In the Shadow of the Moon" documents how the few men who were chosen met that challenge. More than that, it gives us a candid and very personal look at those men and their feelings now, some 40 years later.

It is hard to imagine a sane person climbing to the top of a metal cylinder filled with rocket fuel and waiting patiently to be blasted through the atmosphere to then land on a rock 240,000 miles away. It's also hard to imagine getting back into a small ship and be propelled through that same atmosphere, with the ship reaching temperatures far beyond imagination, to splash down in an ocean somewhere, be picked up and carried to a ticker tape parade and a hero's welcome. Especially after watching rocket after rocket blow up on the pad or disintegrate in the air before even leaving the atmosphere. Who would volunteer to do such a thing? Whose sense of duty to country is so extreme? Whose desire for adventure is so great?

I've always thought Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to be amazing heroes for walking and paddling into such an unknown in 1805 when they set out across America. But they were dependent on their own ingenuity, cunning and endurance. The men who went to the moon were at the mercy of an untried technology, a technology capable of creating forces far beyond human proportion, and the assistance of hundreds of other technicians. They were going where only dreams had gone before and they were going alone.

As one of the men points out, the feeling of stepping out of the landing module onto the surface of a world where you would be the only human was a strange and daunting one.

Neil Armstrong is physically absent from the interviews. However, they all refer to him and bow to him and his noted coolness under pressure. He is said to be a recluse now. Each of the men interviewed is revealed to have been changed mightily by the events of their lives in the 1960's, when they did something no one had ever done and something no one may ever do again. They also become quite charmingly human, fun and funny, so much more accessible, and even giddy in their excitement, than they were when they walked, in their huge bulky white space suits, out to that can full of rocket fuel, climbed to the top, to wait until it either exploded and killed them or blew them into outer space.

I still question in a big way the use of money and science to send people or objects into outer space. It may be a romantic exploration that serves only the few when that money and that science might better serve man if it were turned towards a cure for disease, eliminating poverty or finding other fuels to give us what we think we need. But it is there. It has been done. And it certainly attracts the attention of the world and brings people together in the realization of what must be a common dream. Therefore, I applaud the way it makes a community out of a fractured world. Moreover, "In the Shadow of the Moon" encourages me to celebrate the event and the heroes who created it.

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