If your decision to watch a movie or TV show boils down to its politics, the conservative trigger warnings at Worth it or Woke could be your jam.
The fast-growing website grades films and television series on a 100-point scale based on an average of seven categories, including “non-wokeness.” That final category flags anything reflecting a liberal social agenda toward gender, sexuality or race.
Each review breaks down the “non-wokeness” rating into “woke” (0-49%), “wokeish” (50%-89%) or “unwoke” (90%-100%).
“I review the films based on their artistic merits,” James Carrick, the site’s creator and lone reviewer, told The Washington Times. “But I enumerate the various instances of wokeness so people can make up their minds if it’s too much for them or they’re OK with it.”
Mr. Carrick, a professional DJ and amateur movie lover with a degree in theater and philosophy, launched the site in March.
He said he did so after growing frustrated that Rotten Tomatoes — a website that rates films based on an aggregation of established critics’ reviews and a separate audience score — either favored films that most moviegoers disliked or panned fan favorites.
“I used to love going to Rotten Tomatoes because their system weeded out personal bias. But just look at the disparity between audience score and critic score, and you see it’s now 20 to 40 points for most movies,” Mr. Carrick said.
For example, Rotten Tomatoes found that 59% of critics gave the recent “Super Mario Bros.” animated movie a positive review, making it “rotten.” But 95% of more than 10,000 moviegoers gave it a favorable review.
Mr. Carrick endorsed the film, awarding it a 75% score but judging it 85% “wokeish” because it strives to “appease feminists” by sending Princess Peach to rescue Luigi. He noted in his review that brothers Mario and Luigi must rescue Peach in the Nintendo video game series that inspired the movie.
“That’s all fine and good, but what isn’t is that Peach is absolutely amazing and perfect in every way, completely actualized, and needs to learn nothing in the film,” Mr. Carrick says in the review. “She never makes a mistake or a wrong turn. She is a textbook Mary Sue. Mario is only along for the ride because she allows it.”
Mr. Carrick says Worth it or Woke has grown from about 19,000 unique visitors in April and 45,000 in May to more than 93,000 in the first six days of June — a spike he attributes, ironically, to the publicity stemming from a May 30 article in Rolling Stone that mocked the site.
The article by Miles Klee said the “new movie review website takes us to the final frontier of cinema criticism — rating movies on how likely they are to make conservatives mad.”
Mr. Carrick plans to introduce two more writers this summer to help track what he sees as the most common examples of “wokeness” in movies: unexplained multicultural casting, weak male characters, flawless heroines and transgender advocacy.
He pointed to recent Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences standards that assess films for Oscar consideration based on gender, race and sexual diversity as evidence that leftist bias is worsening.
“Woke in movies is simply when filmmakers put activism over narrative,” he said. “It happens anytime they’re doing something that’s not intended to make the movie as good as it can be, but to stand on a soapbox and push their views of how the world should be.”
Some conservative filmmakers have embraced Worth it or Woke, but others have reacted with hostility.
“It has become our go-to site for whether we go to see a movie. And once the word gets out, it will be the same with the American people,” said filmmaking team Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, who co-wrote and co-directed the 2019 pro-life film “Unplanned.”
However, Kenn Viselman, a producer of more than 50 public television children’s shows from “Teletubbies” to the climate change cartoon “MeteoHeroes,” said the website politicizes entertainment.
“I find this site reprehensible and, although likely to have been designed as a gimmick to get more followers, it is dangerous and fuels the flames of hatred that are already running rampant in this country and around the world,” Mr. Viselman told The Times. “We are living in a very divisive time where people are being criticized, bullied and even murdered for being different.”
While some critics praised Mr. Carrick’s frank acknowledgment of political bias, others said the website goes too far.
“This site, I would imagine, is going to grow in popularity,” said Sasha Stone, a Los Angeles-based film blogger who edits the website Awards Daily. “I would love to know personally before I invest time in a movie whether I’m going to be bombarded with woke messaging or not. This is becoming a big problem for Hollywood, they just haven’t come to terms with it yet.”
National Catholic Register film critic Steven Greydanus, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, suggested Worth it or Woke makes the same mistake it claims to correct by framing entertainment in “polemical, antagonistic, zero-sum, ‘us vs. them’ terms.”
“I get this, and I recognize that on some topics it may be necessary, or at least inevitable. Much of it, though, I find more harmful than helpful,” Mr. Greydanus said.
In 2000, Mr. Greydanus started the website Decent Films, where he scores movies’ “moral/spiritual value” and summarizes adult content for parents. That’s different from leaning hard on politics in every review, he said.
“I don’t look at life, the universe, and everything through a ‘woke vs. anti-woke’ lens, and I’m not interested in film discussion filtered through that lens,” Mr. Greydanus added in an email.
Mr. Carrick says his honesty about what offends him as a conservative has been crucial to the website’s popularity.
“Everyone has a bias, and even though I’m trying to be objective, adding in that extra ‘woke’ bit gives people something they’ve been wanting for years,” he said. “They’re tired of being preached to and want to be entertained. I’m just saving them some time and money.”
