Love Don't Cost a Thing (2003)

With his head always buried in a book or under the hood of a car, Alvin has spent the last three years of high school grinding away at his studies and working as a pool boy to earn extra cash. No doubt, Alvin’s focus has paid off: he’s finally saved enough Benjamins to finish building an engine he designed--an engine that’s going to win him a much-needed college scholarship. But while Alvin is off the charts academically…socially, he’s a big phat zero. Invisible to the “Elites,” the school’s designer label-sporting in-crowd, Alvin spends his Saturday nights playing cards with his equally dorky friends and watching home basketball games from the visitors section. It doesn’t help that Alvin is a bit of a disappointment to his father Clarence, an old school player who longs to re-live his glory days as a ladies man through his impossibly shy son. As he enters his senior year, Alvin is jonesing to kick his nerdy persona to the curb and somehow become cool enough to chill with ultra-popular students like Paris Morgan, the hottest girl in school and queen of the Elites. When Paris accidentally wrecks her mother’s Cadillac Escalade, Alvin seizes the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and engineers a plan to launch him from pariah to player. He presents her with a simple deal: in exchange for Alvin laying down the cash and fixing her mother’s car, Paris will fake a front--pretend to date him--and ensure his entrée into the ranks of the school’s elite. Desperate to get the car fixed before her mother finds out about the accident, Paris reluctantly agrees to Alvin’s plan.