A native English speaker, I have always been perplexed by the tendency of foreigners to use "the" incorrectly. A space ship orbits "the Earth" but not "the Mars", for example. But then I tried to find a guide to using "the"...it is one of our most mysterious words.
As for filler words in English: I totally agree it's madness. The word "set" has like 20 definitions. But you can mess them up and people will still understand you. "I break into car" (the way a Russian learning English would say it) vs "I'll break into the car" are both understood the same; whereas in Chinese if I mess up a (to my ears minor) tone, the information is completely lost.
Mistaken tonality is more like saying "tree" instead of "three".
Tonality is another feature of a speech sound like aspiration or voicing. Although it is not easy for English speakers, there no reason in principle to single it out as especially difficult.
Regarding movies, you can always go for a huge layer of Soviet films. They take some using to I suppose, but then the supply is endless.
I'd put English at around Russian difficulty, hard, but easy to get going. English also has the advantage of having a simple character set (less letters than Russian, French, etc) and English also has a ton of cultural artefacts (songs, movies, etc) to sink your teeth into.
My problem with Russian (unlike say, French, which I've also studied) is that I can't even find music to listen to that's anywhere close in production value to English and there are a couple of good movies (Leviathan, for example) but you can only watch them so many times. I don't know of a single Russian TV show that is anywhere close to HBO or Netflix quality. I'd love a recommendation though if someone here knows of one.