Two Good Movie Ideas

Fact: I have good ideas. Fact: I am poor at acting on these ideas. Fact: I don't really mind that my ideas don't always come to fruition.
One of my key approaches to life is that I don't feel the need to prove myself to others as long as I know I'm sure of myself. You could call this cowardice and you might have a point, but i don't see the need to actually go about proving to you that I can run a marathon if I am fully certain that I could, for instance.
While I was walking to Whole Foods' beer store on Houston last night (let me pause for a second and both trumpet this resource and shame myself for underutilization of it. You buy an empty half-gallon growler for like $3, then you pay from $7-20+ to have it filled with draft beer whenever you want. And they stock delicious beer as well, often locally produced for people who are into that sort of thing. And it's just a 20minute round-trip excursion from my apt.), something mundane got me thinking, as happens frequently. A guy dressed like a cook with longish hair tied back in a ponytail stepped across the sidewalk in front of me outside of a small restaurant, then lit a cigarette and started smoking it alone as he surveyed the street. He looked like how Robert DeNiro might have looked it 1982 if he were preparing for a role as some kind of a cook.
1. So I'm not sure why but that cook's aloneness there on the sidewalk so near to other people gave me a good idea for a movie plot. I should say, not just the cook's aloneness but the complete disengaged sense of being in a place but not of it, is what gave me the good idea. Most movies are of course about people on a basic level, sometimes about people reacting to events but more often the interesting or quality ones are just about people. Further, they are about people interacting with other people. What I mean is that a movie's plot is virtually always advanced through dialogue or some interaction with people, sometimes also with objects (the Raging Bull jail cell scene) or events (Forrest Gump, duh) or environments (Cast Away, aka the greatest movie ever made), but whatever it is specifically it's still basically just the active engagement with outside forces that drives plot.
What I'd propose is that you take an individual--a comedian would be a good subject to help show my point--and follow him not as he deals with people but just before and just after and especially those moments--like with the cook on the sidewalk--when he's amidst people but still alone. I'd go to great lengths to ensure that it wouldn't simply be a case study on loneliness or a biography of a hermit, but instead simply an examination of those times in a life when a person is only himself at his innermost. It's a variation on something I find very interesting: that a person will behave differently when alone than when in company. (Even if the person is completely self-aware and well-adjusted and unaffected by conventions or expectations, he will act differently. An example of this that I've mentioned before is that when I wake to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I will almost never wash my hands afterward, but if at work and someone else is relieving himself at the same time as me I will always do at least a cursory rinse in the sink. How a man reacts to the former tells more about him on a basic level but it's also boring because it's something mostly involuntary for the man. How a man reacts to the latter isn't interesting because it's a social constant, but the thoughtful man's response to his bending in the latter situation is extremely interesting. At least to me.)

2. The other great movie idea I'll share now is one I've had for at least five or six years now, but since I'm now 28 and unlikely ever to follow-up on it (see also Monsieur, Monsieur), I'll share it with the world. This idea is not so much a plot idea as it is a thematic visual idea that would essentially make whatever plot you put behind it simple dressing.
Just a warning now,

(There, I've left an extra space for emphasis.)

but I feel that this is one of the finest artistic-related ideas I've ever had. I always become excited when thinking about the possibilities and the utter originality* of it any time I consider it.

You position the camera lens as though it is an eyeball looking out at the world and just follow your character around. I'm not talking about a simple first-person POV here either. You'd have to semi-blur most of the screen, maybe even blacking out nebulous amounts of the edges, and focus only on the center focal area. Not only that but this central focal area would have to drift and move (and the rest of the screen in kind) as the character's eyes drift from one object to another. I'm no lens expert but I'm not sure the technology was advanced enough to do this right when I first conceived this idea. In 2009 it might be possible.
Vision, and seeing things differently under different levels of focus and sharpness, has always been fascinating to me. This is most likely because unlike most people, I haven't really ever been able to take my vision for granted. (Obviously there are blind people who would scoff at this statement. Sorry to them.) My eyes required correction, but then the correction didn't take so I to go back to glasses, which never felt natural to me. I couldn't get over the fact that I was looking through something to allow me to see, and even then the glasses would slide around or I'd be trying to see with my periphery and of course fail because the frames never seemed to wrap enough quite enough. Finally a year and a half ago I went under the knife and I'm now something close to a normal contactless seer. The only problem is that, depending on the humidity and the wind, my vision can fluctuate slightly. Not enough to ever cause a problem, but enough to recognize it.
That history out of the way, think of the effects this filming technique would produce:
1. You'd get a real point of view. Something that bugs me with traditional POV camera shots is that no human can actually see with clarity the breadth of a movie screen. So while I'm watching a movie shot that way, I'm noticing many details that the character himself can't be processing beyond the simple impressionistic level.
2. You would change the way we think of "realism." (Again, done correctly) I think this is the true elimination of the fourth way in film. It's not virtual reality as we've been exposed to it thus far, because it would still be a film and thus it's goals would still be fictive and artistic.
3. You could add a layer of thought to every second of the film. You're forcing the viewer to consider himself as he watches the film. And you could do it without any subtlety whatsoever, but in such a way that it's effect after watching for a few minutes would dissolve so effortlessly that it would fuzz over the distinction between subtle and nonexistent influences. The possibilities this could open up with storylines and themes and symbols and everything a good writer is good at would be amazing.
Ok I'm getting the feeling that I might be drifting into the realm where I'm not able to make sufficient sense of what I'm trying to say, so perhaps I should cut this short. Know that I love this idea. I love it so much that if it were presented by someone else, I'd still love it and want to write about it.

*The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a recent film that I admired quite a bit, did do something that could be considered similar to what I'm proposing. They used the camera lens to double for a human eye, and narrowed the perspective of that eye to mimic the condition of the main character. However, in that film, they use the technique as a simple way of connecting the audience to the experience of the character, rather than as narrative filmic tool in and of itself. They also didn't go the whole way of constraining the lens' focus to replicate that of an actual eye's. None of this is meant to discredit the technique in the film though. I loved it. I thought it was extremely well done.