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.

Yup, the wedding bells already rang, the in-laws already exploded, and somehow “Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come” still finds a way to make that universe feel even bigger, bloodier, funnier and a whole lot weirder. The sequel to the 2019 horror-comedy favorite picks up with Samara Weaving’s Grace still very much in the blast radius of her last marital disaster, only now the satanic board game has expanded. What was once one deranged family with a pact and a game night from hell becomes something broader here: a hierarchy of elite occult families, strange alliances, legal puppet masters, and a deeper mythology lurking just outside the mansion walls. Directed once again by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the film leans even harder into absurdity, spectacle, and viciously funny chaos without losing Grace’s bruised, everywoman appeal.

On this episode of The Discourse, Mike DeAngelo is joined by writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy to talk about how they cracked the sequel and why the seeds were actually planted years ago. Murphy said they always knew there was more world beyond the first film, even if audiences only caught glimpses of it. “We already knew that there was a larger world out there that we wanted to explore,” he explained. “And so that kernel of an idea was already kind of baked into the cake. And it was just kind of a question of, how to motivate Grace into that larger world.”

READ MORE: ‘Heel’: Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough & Anson Boon On Grief, Redemption, More ‘Adolescence,’ and ‘Mobland’ Season 2 [The Discourse Podcast]

“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.

Grief rarely arrives quietly. In "The Madison", it detonates and leaves a family trying to rebuild their lives in the emotional rubble. The sweeping Paramount+ drama from Taylor Sheridan follows the Clyburn family after a devastating loss sends them from New York City to Montana, where grief, reinvention, and culture shock collide. The series stars Michelle Pfeiffer as matriarch Stacy Clyburn alongside Kurt Russell, Patrick J. Adams, Elle Chapman, Beau Garrett, and more.

On the latest episode of The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast, host Mike DeAngelo spoke with Russell and Pfeiffer about the emotional core of the series and their long‑awaited on‑screen reunion, before sitting down with director Christina Alexandra Voros, who helmed all episodes of the show and has become one of Sheridan’s most trusted collaborators.

Pfeiffer’s entry into the series came in a very Taylor Sheridan fashion. The filmmaker pitched the idea to her informally before any scripts existed over tequila.

Crime fiction has rarely produced a protagonist quite like Kay Scarpetta. For decades, Patricia Cornwell’s bestselling novels followed the brilliant forensic pathologist and medical examiner navigating grisly cases while balancing the messy emotional realities of family, love, and professional obsession. Now, the long-awaited adaptation has finally arrived in the form of Prime Video’s new series “Scarpetta,” starring Nicole Kidman as the iconic medical examiner alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana DeBose, Bobby Cannavale, Simon Baker, and more.

The show is shepherded by creator and showrunner Liz Sarnoff, whose writing résumé includes “Barry,” “Lost,” “Deadwood,” and “Marco Polo.” The series takes an ambitious approach to Cornwell’s world by weaving together two timelines: one set in the late 1990s and another in the present day, allowing the story to explore both the early years of Scarpetta’s career and the more seasoned version of the character audiences meet decades later.

READ MORE: ‘DTF: St. Louis’: Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, David Harbour, & Steve Conrad On Vulnerability, Sexual Secrets, & Jason Bateman’s MCU Character [Bingeworthy Podcast]

On this episode of The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast, Sarnoff joins host Mike DeAngelo to talk about finally bringing the beloved character to the screen, why the show merges multiple books into a single narrative structure, how Kidman approached the technical realities of forensic work, and how the series distinguishes itself from typical procedural storytelling.