This is the end, friends, as the 37th annual Seattle International Film Festival draws to a close this Sunday evening. Don’t forget to check the SIFF updates page to see which films are already sold out or are selling fast, especially since this final weekend brings a couple new films added to the schedule. Notable updates include the addition of El Bulli: Cooking In Progress to the festival lineup and the placement of extra screenings of Late Autumn, Burke & Hare, Angels and Airwaves’ LOVE, Flamenco, Flamenco, Small Town Murder Songs, and The Poll Diaries in the Sunday TBA spots.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the films Team SunBreak has watched earlier this week, as well as those that we’re most looking forward to seeing over the next couple days. Individual tickets for most films cost $11 for the public and $9 for SIFF members. Matinées are a bit cheaper ($8/$7), as are slightly discounted packs of tickets in bundles of 6 or 20. Following the Cinerama screening of Life in a Day, the fest goes out with a bang with the Closing Night Gala at the Pan Pacific Hotel.

WHAT WE SAW:

Tony: Let’s get the disappointing bits outta the way first. Thai import Eternity more than lives up to its name, delivering its modest dramatics at a pace that’s so molasses-running-uphill that paint drying on a wall elicits kinetic thrills by comparison. But at least there’s some artistry and a clarity of vision, even if it ultimately failed on me.

No such redeeming qualities in Funkytown, a Canadian import that details the rise and fall of Montreal’s equivalent of Studio 54, the Starlight. It starts out with some fizzy energy, then descends into an unbelievably, irritatingly stupid melange of heavy-handed cliches. It’s supposedly inspired by true events. You can call it a Boogie Nights for Dummies; I’ll call it my first (and I hope, only) that’s-two-plus-hours-of-my-life-I’ll-never-get-back experience of SIFF 2011. Trust me: I’m not including the remaining showtimes as a community service. Seriously. It’s that bad.

An Argentinian investment banker meets cute with a free-spirited Belgian girl while travelling across Uruguay in Por El Camino. Like any really great trip to another country, it surprises, amuses, meanders, and woos in the most enchanting way possible. You can still catch it tomorrow at 11 a.m. at Pacific Place.

King of Devil’s Island provides a truly wrenching fact-based account of the cruelty and corruption that infested Norway’s Bastoy Boys’ Home, circa 1915. Charismatic lug Benjamin Helstad, who suggests an adolescent Mel Gibson reincarnated in a pitbull’s body, headlines this grittier Nordic take on Cool Hand Luke. It’s the unflinching yet cinematically satisfying fact-based movie that The Whistleblower wanted to be. One more screening takes place at the Admiral, tomorrow at 1 p.m.

Last but not least, I fell quite hard for Krystof Zlatnik’s flawed but frequently striking cautionary fable, Lys. More details in The SunBreak’s interview with Zlatnik (posted earlier today). It screens at the Neptune, tonight at 9:30 p.m. and tomorrow at 11 a.m.

MvB was surprised to find that Hot Coffee, while starting out with a behind-the-hype retelling of the little old lady who sued McDonald’s over too-hot coffee, was in fact an indictment of the Bush the Younger-era push for “tort reform” in the face of “frivolous lawsuits” like the McDonald’s incident. Horrific photos of the extent of the burns don’t look like a laughing matter. The film also takes up the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s loading of Supreme Courts with liability-limiting judges, and the kudzu-like invasion of mandatory arbitration clauses in contracts and purchase agreements (which left a woman gang-raped by fellow employees unable to take her employer to court). (June 11, 11 a.m. @ the Harvard Exit; June 12, 9 p.m. @ the Harvard Exit)

The Most Important Thing in Life is Not Being Dead, from a collective of three directors (two from Spain, one from Switzerland), features a trio of male leads: an insomniac elderly piano tuner, the man living secretly in the tuner’s basement, and a very handsome neighbor. The film loses focus occasionally, wandering around filming pretty things, but the thread of hidden lives from Franco-era Spain emerging into daylight and disrupting carefully ordered appearances is compelling. The film is coy on the subject, but MvB took the three men to be, on one level, reflections of a singular self struggling to reorient in the face of old age. (June 11, 1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place)

Josh: Over the last two days, I saw The Redemption of General Butt Naked and Tabloid and am still not sure what I thought of either documentary or their lead subjects. In the first, a Liberian warlord infamous for terrorizing civilians and sending naked child soldiers into battle finds Jesus, gives up the killing life, and becomes an evangelical preacher who travels from town to town seeking forgiveness from his victims. The filmmakers smartly avoid taking a strong position on the authenticity of his conversion, possibly because it doesn’t really matter, given the scope of his atrocities and the self-serving nature of his redemption tour.

For Tabloid, Errol Morris fired up the Interrotron to talk to Joyce McKinney, a sensation in the British press during the 1977 “Mormon Sex In Chains” case. The engrossing documentary zips along through the salacious allegations by mixing snappy titles and eye-level interviews with reporters from the dueling papers who covered it obsessively, a hired pilot who was along until the caper got too crazy, an ex-Mormon to contextualize, and a Korean cloning scientist (yes, you heard that right, it gets even wilder). While Morris gets a lot of laughs along the way, often at McKinney’s expense, he’s balanced enough to leave audiences to judge which conflicting account of the insane story is closest to the truth. That said, in a race for sympathy against a Mormon conspiracy and the bloodthirsty press, the telegenic lovestruck oddball beauty queen might come out ahead. (Wild enough to merit a trip to West Seattle Saturday, 3:15 p.m. @ the Admiral)

At last night’s screening, claiming to have been barred from entering the theater with her cloned dog, McKinney emerged from a taxi outside SIFF Cinema just as crowds were streaming out of the screening and trying to make sense of what they’d seen. Clutching a hand-scrawled sign identifying herself, she held court for the gathering onlookers to denounce Morris’ film and his treatment of her. I didn’t stay to hear the whole diatribe, which seemed to follow closely to the talking points in the “truthteller” review, but it added a further layer of spectacle to a mind-boggling story.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

• Letters from the Big Man It’s a tale as old as time, when girl meets Bigfoot. (June 10, 6 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 11, 4:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
• Third Star Four British friends, one of whom has a serious illness, go on a road trip. Wackiness and poignancy ensues. (June 10, 7 p.m. @ Admiral; June 12, 1 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
• Revenge of the Electric Car Their last film asked Who Killed the Electric Car? But apparently it won’t stay dead! (June 10, 7 p.m. @ the Egyptian; June 12, 4:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
• Poupoupidou (Nobody Else But You) It’s a French murder mystery where the dead girl is a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. (June 10, 9:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian; June 12, 1:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)
• The Yellow Sea promises to be SIFF 2011’s breakout action epic. (9:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 11, 1:15 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
• Winnie the Pooh Disney revives the hunny-huffing willy-nilly-silly-old bear for 2011 audiences. Get that jaded sneer off your kissers, SIFF snobs: It’s an honest-to-God cel-animated feature. And it’s Winnie the Pooh, for Pete’s sake. (standby June 11, 9:30 a.m. @ Majestic Bay; June 12, 1:30 p.m. @ Egyptian)
• Hayfever Three words: Italian Empire Records! (June 11, 7 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 12, 11 a.m. @ Pacific Place)
• Norwegian Wood It’s the world premiere of the film adaptation of the Murakami novel, so of course very few tickets are still available. (standby June 11, 6 p.m. @ the Egyptian; June 12, 3:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian)
• Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card-Counting Christians These Seattle evangelicals are gambling for Jesus! (standby June 11, 6 p.m. @ Admiral; Sunday, 3:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
• Toast This foodie installation on the SIFF schedule is based on the childhood memoir of British chef and food writer, Nigel Slater. (June 11, 6:30 p.m. @ the Neptune; June 12, 11 a.m. @ the Neptune)