Nerding Day: Worth It or Woke

I'm going to pitch you a concept for a new website taking the internet by storm. You might have heard of it, but I want you to appreciate how a simple, brilliant premise is all you need for success. Ok, it's Rotten Tomatoes, only all of the reviews are written by one guy, and that guy super duper sucks.

Usually, I wouldn't be interested in covering a conservative movie review website, but this one is deeply weird. It feels like I'm watching someone learn how to grift in real time. The site isn't even a year old yet, and it seems like its creator, James Carrick, hasn't quite figured out how to do the conservative personality thing yet. For instance, one of the first things you see when you go to the website right now is a review of the movie Mean Girls. What does he think his audience will like about Mean Girls? The fact that the girl is mean? Certainly not the musical numbers and their distracting respit.

If you have to know if a movie is "woke" or not to enjoy it, the only way you're checking out Mean Girls is if you trip over the remote and accidentally switch off Reacher. Then you have to call your son to help you figure out how to use the remote, and he gets mad when you tell him they're turning the frogs gay, but you were just trying to make small talk about the new Frog And Toad series on AppleTV+. The frogs were always gay, dad!

Worth It Or Woke doesn't review things if they think they can mark them as "#woke sight unseen," but it thought their primary audience might be interested in Mean Girls, The Barbie Movie, and 80 For Brady? I get that It's a good idea for the Worth It Or Woke brand to tear apart movies that are already pissing off the Twitter conservatives, but I don't think anyone was particularly mad about Mean Girls? Also, James Carrick kind of likes it! He called it "A love letter to fans of the original" while also rating it Woke. I'm told Woke is bad and Based is good, but the rating system is so nuts I have no idea what the final verdict on the movie was.

Worth It Or Woke rated Mean Girls 60% Woke and 35% Based on their Woke-O-Meter, leaving 5% of the movie free to roam as it pleases in the lands between Woke and Based. They also rated several elements of the film individually, finding the visuals/cinematography to be 75% (or Wokeish), while the direction was 60% (also Wokeish). To be considered at all Based, a film must score between 90-100% on The Woke-O-Meter, our about double baseline competency. Here's how the site breaks it down:

How do you decide if cinematography is Woke or not? Are they putting too many women in the frame? Does Regina George have a poster on her bedroom wall that says "Ruth Badger Ginsburg Fucks?" Are a couple of the students at the Mean Girl school open-carrying some AR-15s? That would be Based, I guess? Luckily, the site has provided their definition of Woke; a page-long rant that includes right-wing greatest hits such as "Disney's Not So Secret Gay Agenda," but the meat of it is this paragraph:

There's a reason we, the ultra/radical-progressives, settled on a simple five-star rating system for movies. They're not Sega Genesis games. No one is looking for a reviewer's thoughts on every individual aspect of them distilled down to six different numbers. Especially not when those thoughts are how Aquaman is 80% Based, but its direction is 40% Woke?

Whenever I'm researching a project undertaken by a new right-wing firebrand, I find it's always helpful to ask what this man has failed at in his life to make him this way. Ben Shapiro is a failed screenwriter, Steven Crowder a failed comedian, and Glenn Beck a failed morning drivetime shock-jock. The site's one reviewer, James Carrick, describes himself as a "film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy." There is an actor named James Carrick on IMDB who once portrayed the role of Chubb Anderson on Behind Mansion Walls. Is that the James Carrick we're looking for? God, I wish.

One thing I can say for sure about James is that the picture he uses on the website is either very old or something he created by putting "Ponzi scheme Topher Grace" through an AI image generator. Here's a side-by-side comparison of Website James Vs. Actual James appearing on Fox News to discuss "Biden's plot to make AI woke."

Fox News got James off the air almost immediately after not Yes-Anding their prompt to bash Disney's Little Mermaid reboot hard enough. When asked what he rated Little Mermaid, he didn't know, said it was "in the 30s," then went into trying to explain the rating system before Fox News pulled out a comically oversized cane and yanked him off stage. James doesn't have the right-wing improv skills for this job. When someone says black Little Mermaid, you're supposed to scream like it's the secret word, my guy.

Even Worth It Or Woke's merch store seems like nonsense liberals think conservatives would want to buy. They've got $12 "Come And Take It" shot glasses that contribute one dollar of each sale to Texas border wall defense in some unspecified way. They've got a First Amendment phone case. Their t-shirts are only available in manly colors. Worth It Or Woke respects that you can both enjoy the distracting respit of the songs of Mean Girls and also need to be able to fade into the woods when the revolution comes.

The reviews themselves read like any poorly written film review. The About Us section of Worth It Or Woke says that the site has a "religious conservative voice" (James and one other guy who writes entertainment news are the referenced us). I don't know what Jesus would have to say about Transformers Rise Of The Beasts, but I think if you're going to call yourself a religious conservative movie review site, you should at least speculate a little bit on His views. Instead, James mostly peppers broad complaints with lame car jokes.

James's bio on Worth It Or Woke says he "approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophical foundation." In the original version of his Transformers review, he called Pete Davidson "Pete Townsend" and then had to correct it after a commenter, Zippy Fister, pointed it out. That's the kind of high-brow philosophical debate you can find about Transformers Rise Of The Beasts you won't get anywhere else.

The site doesn't cover most movies with a strong message because the message is never "capitalism rules, high five." There's no room for a philosophical foundation in their highest-rated movies, stuff like Kid Explorer, released by The Daily Wire (95% Woke, brought down a bit by mere Wokeish Visuals/Cinematography), and Back To The Future, which they gave a perfect 100 out of 100!?

The….the movie where the guy has to run from his mom who's trying to fuck him like Pepé Le Pew? That's the most Based movie? A hundred percent Based? Not a Woke frame in that entire film? I still don't think I understand what based means. It sounds like basic, which is bad. It sounds like, "Yes, please, no seasoning on my tacos, but I'll take a nice cool bottle of ketchup, Mr. Serverino." Wait, I do think I understand what based means.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brandon Garlock, whose 23andMe results say he's 1/16th Wokeish on his mother's side. 

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