I loved the stories that people made up when I said that Vin Diesel broke my car earlier in the year. Sure my car was broken a bit, and I showed readers of this blog a photo of the aftermath, but I couldn’t at the time say why it was broken on set. People started assuming that he drove it into a wall and all sorts of crazy stuff!

Anyway, the trailer for Fast and Furious was released recently and my car was in the trailer (very briefly). I thought I’d take a couple freeze frames from the trailer to explain now more of the story.

So as you can see, Vin takes this guy, picks him up by the neck and slams him onto my car. This was apparently done take after take (I feel bad for that guy getting slammed over and over again). Anyway, the scene involves more than just that, and from what the guys on set reported to me, it sounds like it’ll be a really cool scene to watch. For now the trailer with the dude getting slammed down will have to suffice.

If you haven’t yet gotten a chance to check out Death Race, feast your eyes on this muddy cell phone video that looks to be the first theatrical trailer for Fast And Furious, being aired during the Death Race previews. The trailer gives away a pretty extensive clip from a fuel-tanker hijacking scene that takes place in the Dominican Republic. Watch it while you can!

[Update: you can now see the officially-released, slick-quality trailer here!]

USA Today posted some apparent screen shots from the new Fast and Furious film. Included among the subjects is one of the mint Grand Nationals that gets trashed in the film (RIP to the six of them), along with Vin Diesel’s mean-looking Chevelle SS, of which we’ve already seen plenty of illicit footage. And surprise, Paul Walker’s going to be driving an R34 Skyline! See the other shots below the jump, and stay tuned for more—now that the stills are starting to trickle out, the official trailer can’t be far behind!

Thanks for the heads-up, Jalopnik!

Continue reading "Fresh Fast and Furious Pics" »

While it lacks the in-your-face street-racing action of the spy video we showed you on Tuesday, this set footage from Hollywood spy site X17video gives some interesting clues about what’s going on in the new Fast and Furious film. Paul Walker and Vin Diesel hop out of their rides and act like they’re gonna throw some hands. The Skyline gets a thorough dousing with a smoke machine at around 2:30, and the Chevelle appears to have sustained some body damage. We’re wondering if Brian still owes Dom a ten-second car.

[Check out all of our Fast and Furious coverage here, including breaking stories and rare spy videos!—Ed.]

The first casualty of The Fast and the Furious 4 turned out to be this sick Honda S2000, which somehow managed to get on the bad side of the character once famously accused of having "a gas tank for a brain." The car’s owner, Ben over at Bespoke Ventures, probably under a gag order from Universal, doesn’t explain the circumstances under which "Vin got a little more into character than we all expected," but the vehicle’s hood, fender, and headlight clearly bore the brunt of it. Those custom graphics are going to be tough to match, but Ben’s being a good sport about the whole thing: he’s already selling a "Vin Diesel Broke My Car" T-shirt on cafepress. Careful, Ben: I don’t know if you wanna taunt the dude who once beat a guy half to death with a 3/4" torque wrench.

Want to know how Vin smashed the car? Check out Ben’s 8/28 update!

Darkblade06 over at VWVortex staked out the FF4 set on Friday, and has posted a bunch of photos from the 9th day of filming. Most of them are pretty blurry (it was a night scene), but they do give you an idea of what cars are going to look like in the film. There’s an STI that’ll presumably be the one Paul Walker’s character will drive, though it’s got a different color scheme than the one Rob blogged last month. Dominic Toretto will be driving a Chevelle this time around, though a Charger will also be getting some screen time (the script has Dom’s original ride being "rebuilt" after the first film’s climactic barrel roll—yeah right!). Go below the jump to see more shots, and check out the backstory at VWVortex.

CarDomain member Freesol, who managed to get both his custom Solstice and his son into The Fast and the Furious 4 after hearing about the casting call right here in the blog, has passed along this video footage filmed at the set. You get some nice views of a lot of the cars, including the Solstice, that are involved in the opening funeral scene—watch for them taking off as they leave the set! At the website hosting this video, you’ll also see some stills from the set of Vin Diesel hanging around, and Paul Walker looking especially spiffy, but nothing more on the cars. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: Mozilla Firefox users, try this version of the video. The original sometimes won’t play unless you’re running Explorer.

Look at the car Lindsay Lohan climbs into at the junk yard (about two minutes into the video) and tell me if you think it’s the same 70 Charger that Vin Diesel crashes in The Fast and the Furious.

The latest rumors on The Fast and the Furious 4 indicate that time is running out on the popular street-racing film franchise. An imminent industry-wide strike, predicted to bring all of Hollywood grinding to a halt by the end of next June, is tightening the noose on the Fast filmmakers, who are now forced to begin filming by March. Problem is, the film as yet has no script, and Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin is only tentatively connected to the project at this point. Even the casting is still a little up in the air; while producers hoped to bring back a lot of the original players, including Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, actors are already overbooked in preparation for the strike and may be hard to get. CarDomain predicts that the fiasco may in fact work out well for The Fast and the Furious 4, with the time-crunch cultivating the kind of badly-written dialogue and cornball acting that we’ve come to expect from the series.  As long as someone says something along the lines of "I live my life one quarter-mile at a time," I’ll be happy.