Parents deserve better from cinema classifiers

The lyrics of Blowin' in the Wind flooded into my head as I watched the movie trailers before the PG-classified Spiderwick Chronicles recently. You know the line: "And how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died". Apparently the answer is rather a lot. In five minutes on a Sunday morning in a cinema packed with families with young children, trailers for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Ironman and Star Trek were screened. All were dark, scary and, in the case of the first two, extraordinarily violent. Yet all three previews had Office of Film and Literature Classification approval. They could have been shown with any movie any time. This is despite the fact that both Ironman and Indiana Jones have computer games already classified M and blind Freddy could see from the content of the trailer that the movies should carry M classifications as well. It seems to be a hole in the classification regulations big enough to drive a truck through that you can preview any movie any time until they are classified but at that point trailers are restricted to being shown only with a movie of the same or lesser classification. Granted, trailers have to be classified themselves but both the Australian and the US regulators considered all three trailers as appropriate for all audiences. Which can only mean that either the regulators are way out of step with community expectations or I am. You take the most violent highlights of a movie, package them in a trailer completely out of context and that's okay for general audiences when the same level of violence spread out over 90 or so minutes isn't. What kind of warped logic is that? It just seems harder and harder for parents to make active, considered choices about the level of violence their children are exposed to. Surely parents should be able to take the kids to the cinema on a Sunday morning and have a reasonable expectation of what kind of content they will see. The present regulator-approved free-for-all is just not in the interests of good parenting.