Yeah the movies from emumovies are not free. They are available through Launchbox but you need a paid subscription yes. They are available from there website for free but they are the low quality ones and will take you months to download.
It will work in Retroarch, u just need to specify that controller, ppsspp, I'm not sure on off hand, but remember it works with dinput I think, which is what that pad is.
No, attract mode is the same regardless of theme, and what you are suggesting will probably break things for people like me. I have that game details screen switched off in the options.
Personally I go for the card with the better cooler, as that means you could overclock the card if wanted. I'm not sure how AMD cards handle it, but NVidia cards have a built in overclocker (gpu boost 3.0), that will go as high as it can as long as the cooler can cool it.