I chose a regular 2-hour movie download - about 1.2G - as my first torrent download.  What is a normal time for something like that to complete?  At first, the time estimated was like 14 days + - now it's under 2 hours, but that still does not seem "ultra fast."  Is that typical?

there is no such thing as 'normal time' with torrents, any torrent client

UL and DL seeds are affected by a multitude of variables i.e how many are seeding, DLing, ISP policies, other peer settings, your settings etc.

Best you can do is share openly and frrely as much as you can, optimize your system for that.. and help others do the same. Strengthening the p2p mesh network is the essence of it all.