What Women Want

1	Something's Gotta Give / Sammy Davis Jr. 2:06
2	Too Marvelous for Words / Frank Sinatra 2:27
3	The Best Is Yet to Come / Nancy Wilson 2:22
4	I Won't Dance / Frank Sinatra 3:22
5	Bitch / Meredith Brooks 4:13
6	The Good Life / Tony Bennett 2:15
7	Mack the Knife / Bobby Darin 3:08
8	I've Got You Under My Skin / Frank Sinatra 3:42
9	If I Had You / Nnenna Freelon 4:48
10	What a Girl Wants / Christina Aguilera 3:36
11	Nobody But Me / Lou Rawls 2:47
12	Night and Day / The Temptations 3:55
13	I've Got the World on a String / Peggy Lee 2:20
14	Everything About You / Alan Silvestri 3:02

Barnes & Noble

The slightly uneven but solicitous soundtrack for the Mel Gibson/Alan Alda flick What Women Want features hits from popular music's golden era, when Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. headlined huge Vegas shows and martinis were the drink du jour. Like the When Harry Met Sally soundtrack -- which established nouveau jazz singer/pianist Harry Connick Jr.'s career -- this album relies on its connections to the past, but makes more of an effort to give the music a post-millennial update, which results in an awkward generation gap. Still, you'll revel in Sammy Davis Jr.'s take on the Johnny Mercer classic "Something's Gotta Give" and Tony Bennett's pop standard "The Good Life." Bobby Darin delivers Sinatra-style crooning on his classic "Mack the Knife," and Sinatra himself performs "Too Marvelous for Words," the playful "I Won't Dance," and the intensely vulnerable ballad "I've Got You Under My Skin." But the soundtrack changes course with the inclusion of rocker Meredith Brooks' angry, but passionate track "Bitch" and the teeny-pop of Christina Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants." As it turns out, classic Vegas-style crooning clashes with the gritty electric guitars and slick production of MTV-era pop. Even so, all of the tunes here play into the theme of romance and individuality, even while straddling the gap between 1950s glitz and shiny 2000 pop. Kevin Giordano

All Music Guide

The film What Women Want is a fantasy and romantic comedy centered on an advertising executive who loves the 1950s music of Frank Sinatra and embodies some of its "ring-a-ding-ding" attitudes until one of those magical things that happen only in the movies changes his outlook. The character's musical taste drives this various-artists soundtrack album (Alan Silvestri's score is restricted to a three-minute excerpt at the end), one of the few ever to boast Sinatra tracks when Sinatra himself didn't star in the film, along with similar material performed by Sinatra contemporaries Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peggy Lee, Lou Rawls, and Nancy Wilson, with the Temptations contributing a reading of Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and Nnenna Freelon a newly recorded version of the 1929 song "If I Had You." All of this makes for a reasonable sampler of '50s and early-'60s style pop singing, except for a couple of late-'90s hits jarringly thrown into the mix. No doubt Meredith Brooks' "Bitch" and Christina Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants" comment on the film's basic plot -- a man who suddenly finds himself able to read women's minds -- but these contemporary pop/rock recordings seriously upset the album's mood. So it goes with soundtrack albums, though, and people buying the album as a souvenir of the film probably won't mind. William Ruhlmann