Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for dramatic readings
Take a Drink: for visits to La Cucina
Take a Drink: whenever the grandson is a little butthole
Take a Drink: for every argument with Rishad
Take a Drink: for that ringtone
Do a Shot: whenever grandpa gets wooed
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
What’s the Venice International Film Festival without at least one Italian film? I’m glad I got the chance to catch one.
Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t is about a retired Italian professor of classics living a quiet life- at least until the his daughter and grandchildren sweep into town.
A Toast
This is a nicely lit and lensed portrait of regular life, Italian style. Writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio started his filmic career at the tender age of 60 with Venice First Film prizewinner Mid-August Lunch in 2008, and returns here with another effort built around his laid-back charms and the those of the Fall color-flecked Roman neighborhood his character resides in.
Game of Thrones‘s Tom Wlaschiha plays the German professor whose philandering precipitates the film’s events- driving his wife and Di Gregorio’s daughter away and to to her father’s house in Rome, and ultimately himself on a trek of self-discovery that spans from Germany to Italy on foot (picking up what sure looks like but nobody’s certain is a wolf along the way).
Light comedy is found via conflict between all of the characters, but it never threatens to spark into a conflagration. This is a pleasant film full of largely pleasant people- at least besides that little shit Tommaso.
Beer Two
Tommaso really is mal-educado. Modern child-rearing needn’t skip discipline altogether.
That’s also the chillest grandpa-annoying rap song perhaps ever put to film.
Beer Three
This film is perhaps largely a local commercial play, debuting as it does towards the end of the festival. It’s a feels a bit slight and broad in aggregate, not terribly different than light familial comedic dramas the world over.
Verdict
Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t is an amusing and affable family drama in an attractive Italian urban setting.
