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The comedy “Balls Up” isn’t messing around. Yes, the title is a dick joke. The plot is a dick joke. And yes, the script is packed with dick jokes. It’s as immature and as dumb as they come, and yet, it oddly works because it just commits so hard and earnestly to the bit. Directed by Peter Farrelly—who knows a thing or two about immature, purile comedies with lots of dick jokes like “Dumb and Dumber,” “There’sSomething About Mary,” etc. — “Balls Up” does not ease you into its insanity. It sprints straight at you with it and keeps building, stacking absurdity on top of absurdity, until it becomes this weirdly impressive feat of endurance. And thanks to the sure hands of its director and stars, it somehow works.
The film follows two condom marketing executives/salespeople, Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser), who pitch a bold full‑coverage condom sponsorship with the World Cup. After their drunken antics in Brazil spark a global scandal, they must outrun furious fans, criminals, and power-hungry officials to salvage their careers and make it home alive.
On this episode of The Discourse, Mike DeAngelo is joined by Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser, and director Peter Farrelly (“Green Book”) to break down how you even begin to make a movie like this, why commitment is everything in comedy, and how something this dumb can actually be smart.

Bob Odenkirk playing a small-town interim sheriff squaring off against the Yakuza is not a sentence that should make sense, let alone sell a movie. It sounds like a dare, or the kind of idea you giggle at before moving on. And yet, “Normal” takes that slightly absurd premise and treats it with just enough sincerity, grit, and tonal whiplash to make you lean in instead of check out (read our review).
The film, starring Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul,” “Nobody”) and written by Derek Kolstad— the screenwriting architect behind all the “John Wick” films— follows a small-town sheriff named Ulysses who finds himself pulled into a spiraling situation involving organized crime, buried history, and a small, quiet town that’s about to get a lot louder.
READ MORE: ‘Balls Up’: Mark Wahlberg, Paul Walter Hauser and Peter Farrelly Go All-In On R-Rated Chaos, ‘Transformers,’ ‘Resident Evil’, ‘I Play Rocky,’ Marvel and More [The Discourse Podcast]
It works because “Normal” doesn’t behave like a single movie. It slyly shapeshifts. A dry, slightly offbeat character piece suddenly turns tense and violent, then veers into dark comedy, a thriller, and back again. The movie wants you to feel those shifts, to adjust in real time, preferably with a crowd that’s hooting and hollering right alongside you.

What made the first season of “Beef” so good is that it refused to shrug off a ridiculously small thing, a little bit of road rage. It didn't let that incident seem small. Instead, it became a complete and total falling apart for two people. They just kept making a conflict that should have ended in a parking lot get bigger and bigger, until it was uncomfortably, painfully true to life. It flourished in specifics, being both amusing, shockingly harsh, and really honest about how quickly people can lose it when they don't feel like anyone notices them.
Season two of “Beef” pulls the same kind of nasty trick, but it begins with something incredibly simple & contained. A couple happens to witness something they shouldn't. They really ought to just walk away. They don't. They decide to use what they’ve seen, and that’s what launches Season 2 into pure petty chaos.

Adam McKay and Kevin Messick have spent the last decade-plus pinballing across genres with a kind of deliberate, morbid curiosity. One project dissects the financial system (“The Big Short”), another stares down extinction with a grin (“Don’t Look Up”), and another turns boardrooms into bloodsport (“Succession”). So no, a lean, camp-tinged shark thriller isn’t the obvious next stop. But “Thrash” feels less like a detour and more like the same thesis wearing a shark costume: what happens when systems strain, snap, and spill into chaos?
On this episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo is joined by Adam McKay and Kevin Messick, the producers behind “Thrash,” a storm survival movie that starts in a recognizable climate-disaster lane and then, with a grin, tips over into something sharper, stranger, and a little meaner. The hook, at least at the start, is that balance between plausible and pulpy.

“Pizza Movie” locks onto a very dumb, very specific crisis and rides it for all it’s worth. After one terrible drug-based decision, the night keeps getting weirder, louder, and more desperate, with pizza becoming the only objective that matters. It keeps escalating without losing the thread, which is what makes it work. For all the bodily chaos and ridiculous panic, the movie understands something real about being that age: everything feels massive, nothing is in proportion, and sometimes your friends are the only reason the whole night doesn’t completely implode.
Written and directed by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, the film follows a group of college freshmen whose night turns surreal after they take a drug that will fry their brains without pizza. What begins as a quick trip two floors down spirals into sketch-comedy chaos with a genuine coming-of-age core. Led by Gaten Matarazzo, Lulu Wilson, and Sean Giambrone, the ensemble gives the film its heart. It earned a raucous standing ovation at SXSW.
When the cast and filmmakers joined “The Discourse,” the chemistry clearly was not forced. They built it by hanging out, messing around, and growing into a believable unit.