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Monday, December 23, 2024  
20 Jumada Al-Akhirah 1446  

'War Horse' gallops forth on Dec 25

The man who once saved Private Ryan and raided the lost Ark now seems to be facing his most herculean feat.

Three-time Academy Award winner Steven Spielberg is back with two new movies opening just four days apart.

The 3-D animated adventure “The Adventures of Tintin” hits theaters Dec. 21, and the World War I epic “War Horse,” based on a Broadway play that’s based on a children’s book, opens on Christmas.

The first,"War Horse," is based on a children's book, in which Joey the horse must leave the boy who loves him so to do his duty for England (and a few other countries) in World War I. It's Spielberg through and through, with breathtaking scenery, crashing war scenes, and a horse and characters you come to love. And it opens on Christmas, optimized for family viewing. (Opens Dec. 25.)

The last time Spielberg had an action-adventure and a drama on screens in the same year, he won Best Director and Best Picture at the Oscars for “Schindler’s List” and notched one of the biggest blockbusters of all-time in “Jurassic Park.”

“I justify it only because my great heroes of the ’30s and ’40s would make between two and four movies a year when Hollywood was an organized dream factory and directors could go from assignment to assignment,” Spielberg, who turns 65 today, told the News.

“I kind of used that as an energy booster to justify why I was being so crazy and also as a justification for why my family shouldn’t hate me.”

In between Manhattan press jaunts for “Tintin” and “War Horse” held a week apart, Spielberg flew back to Richmond, Va., to continue filming his next movie, “Lincoln.”

“The guy’s unstoppable,” says actor Jamie Bell, who plays the title role in “Tintin.”

“He’s similar to Clint Eastwood. When I worked with Eastwood on ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ Clint was in fatigues, he was jumping in and out of boats, he was running up beaches with a camera. I mean, these guys are unstoppable, they’re forces of nature.”

Spielberg had been dreaming of making a “Tintin” movie for more than 20 years, since stumbling on a French review of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” that compared Indiana Jones to Europe’s favorite fictional globe-trotting reporter.

After buying a few of Herge’s books, he got the Belgian writer on the phone to sweet talk him into letting him make a movie. It took two decades, however, for technology to catch up to the film in his head.

Spielberg — whose career was almost sunk by a mechanical shark that wouldn’t bite in “Jaws” — decided the time was right after seeing buddy James Cameron use performance-capture technology to create the exotic world in “Avatar.”